


Of Mummy Men & Bathtub Soup

by TheIcyQueen



Series: The CREEPiverse - A "ghost hunting" AU [2]
Category: The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan (Video Game), Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Comedy, Developing Relationship, F/M, Flirting, Fluff and Humor, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Paranormal Investigators, Sibling Rivalry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26734294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheIcyQueen/pseuds/TheIcyQueen
Summary: For Conrad, it wasn’t anything personal...except it was. Who did Alex and Julia think they were? Did they not understand the implicit rules of the sibling hierarchy? If he had to deal with the reality of his little sister - his baby sister - getting engaged and married and, God help them all, having kids before he’d had even one noteworthy long-term relationship, then hey, she and Alex could deal with what he threw right back at them.Well. What he’d have the CREEPs throw at them, anyway.
Relationships: Conrad (Dark Pictures) & Everyone, Conrad/Fliss DuBois
Series: The CREEPiverse - A "ghost hunting" AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790200
Comments: 33
Kudos: 17





	1. Prologue: Family - The greatest horror of all

**Author's Note:**

> The spooky month is upon us, my friends, and you all know what that means...THE CREEPS ARE BACK, BABY!!! Strap in, suit up, pound an energy drink and put on your favorite hoodie, because we've got places to go! Some familiar...some less so ;P
> 
> This story is dedicated not to a singular person, but instead to eldest siblings everywhere...and to the nine month period of time where my younger brother was engaged and I went through no fewer than 15 existential crises. 
> 
> Relevant tags for this chapter and, let's be real, a LOT of this story: LIGHT COMEDIC BODY HORROR!!!!!

The week hadn’t been going, uh, well, great. In fact, one could _almost_ say that the week had been slowly but surely sucking out his will to live like a bog leech going to town on a pasty swimmer’s varicose vein-riddled nutsack…assuming, of course, that the bog in question was filled with month-old human piss instead of water.

He was already in a bad fucking mood, was the point. A really, _really_ bad fucking mood. This dinner? It was supposed to be a break from that, okay? It was supposed to be some kind of _respite_ against the Week From Hell.

All he wanted to do—the only fucking thing!—was eat an irresponsibly expensive steak, down a couple irresponsibly expensive craft beers, make fun of JJ for _not_ ordering an irresponsibly expensive dessert, and then spend the rest of the night in a well deserved food coma. That was it. That was… _all he wanted_. Was that really so much to ask?!

Apparently it was.

“It’s not _that_ bad…” Julia sighed, resting a hand against her cheek as she swirled her wineglass with the other. She’d been taking a wine-tasting course that semester, one that she was always so quick to remind him was ‘actually a _sommelier_ class, you skeeze,’ and as such, had started adding cute little quirks like that to her typical behavior: wine swirling, wine sniffing, insisting on ordering wine with a frankly insulting excuse of a French accent, all that good shit. “I mean, for a house full of frat boys, at least…”

“I don’t know _how_ you’re doing it, sweetie—I would be _beside_ myself. I know that development like the back of my hand by now, and just the _thought_ of _living_ in one of those rickety, drafty old things…”

The ‘rickety, drafty old thing’ in question was nothing short of a McMansion, but Conrad knew better than to dare open his mouth while Mom and Mini-Mom were having one of their moments. Instead he raised his eyebrows and took a long drink, meeting his dad’s gaze just long enough to communicate ‘This again, huh?’

“It’s been _months_ and I _still_ can’t sell that property down the street! Do you have any idea how many showings I’ve done? Everything goes _fine_ , and they always _love it_ , and then, without fail, each and every single time we make it down into that horrible unfinished basement, suddenly it’s all ‘Ooh, well, we’ll have to think on it! We’ll be in touch!’” After a wine-swirl of her own, Mom took a drink as well. “Sure they will. Suuure they will. If I had a nickel…”

“Oh the basement is absolutely the worst. It’s disgusting! They keep putting off working on that part, and like…I’m not complaining. Everything’s so soggy and moldy…”

“Exactly! The ground was just so wrong for a development of that size, and—”

If he had to hear _one more second_ of this banal, inane, pointless bullshit, he was going to slam his own head against the table until he lost consciousness. Then they were _all_ gonna be sorry, because he was fairly positive most people pissed themselves when they fainted. _He_ would. He would make a point to piss himself just out of principle. That would be his last-ditch effort, though…he had a few other things in his arsenal that would probably irritate and embarrass the ladies just as badly…without involving ruining his khakis.

For example: “Well, I’m sure the spooky ghosts don’t help.”

Oh, and like this was some carefully crafted play ( _The Conrad Conundrum_ , coming this fall to a community theater stage near you), his sister and mom turned to him in unison, their expressions matching scowls of exasperation. Dad was snickering, though, so at least he wasn’t totally alone on this sinking ship.

Those faces, he knew, meant they were expecting some sort of clarification. However, that wasn’t the game he played. Oh no. Oh nonono, Conrad Bishop was a man who caved for nothing and no one—he offered no branches of peace, nor did he help those who could just as easily help themselves. He tipped his beer towards Julia with a nod, and then, without breaking eye contact, took another long, gulping drink.

He did not stop drinking.

He was quickly running out of beer with which to make his point.

He began to give serious thought to how long after he finished said beer that he could ostensibly continue to pointedly stare at his sister while pretending to drink it before the behavior became socially unacceptable.

Thankfully, it didn’t have to come to that.

“Connie…” his mother began, sounding pre-tired, if such a thing were possible. She set her wineglass down in favor of pressing her fingers primly to her temples. “What. _Are_. You talking about?”

“Oh good God—Mom, don’t—”

Nope, he was _not_ about to let JJ take over the conversation. Again. Like she always did. Consistently. “The _ghosts_ ,” he repeated, swallowing down a belch (the steakhouse was a little too pinky-out for that sort of thing). “Y’know, from all the dead people.”

His mother blinked.

Julia rolled her eyes.

His dad continued to eat what was left of his baked potato. Probably the wisest choice, all considering.

“The dead people,” he continued, only picking up steam as Julia’s face fell further and further, “From the gallows. The gallows the whole shebang was built on. The gallows from the 1800’s. That gallows. … _those_ gallows? Them. The place where people got hung for stealing bread and shi…” he paused, again very aware of how both hoity _and_ toity this place was, “…and _stuff_.”

“It’s ‘hanged,’ not ‘hung.’ Jesus Christ, Conrad, there’s a difference.”

“Pretty sure there’s not.”

“Okay, so me saying ‘he was hanged’ and me saying ‘he was hung’ mean _exactly_ the same thing to you, then? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“…well if you’re going to put it that way—”

Before either of them could dig their heels any deeper into _that_ particular pit of bullshit, Mom (predictably) interrupted. “ _Gallows?!_ What _are_ you talking about?! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever—”

“Nah, it’s totally legit! Brad was telling us _allllll_ about it the other night.”

“Oh my God…do you get this is why me and Alex never invite you over? You do get that, right? Because _these_ are the conversations you _insist_ on having in front of everyone.”

“JJ, please, it’s not my fault that Bradlebury’s more interesting to talk to than Alex. That one’s on _you_ , okay? Rookie mistake, you set all your chips on the _boring_ sibling.”

“Alex isn’t _boring!_ ” Mom cut in, clucking her tongue humoringly, “Honestly, Connie, you’re going to need to be nicer to him, if he and Julia—” She stopped when Dad cleared his throat.

When he had time to think back on it later (not that he wanted to), Conrad would realize that was the precise moment where things really started to unravel. See, he was a man of many, many talents, but…reading a room? Not one of them! Not even close. So maybe a more, uh, aware or conscientious or…emotionally capable adult might’ve noticed the way his parents’ postures changed, but he was none of those things.

Luckily for his parents, neither was Julia.

“Brad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Um…hello? Are we talking about the same person here? Bradical _always_ knows what’s what, JJ. Knowing random history crap is like…his reason for _being_. It’s in his genetic code, wedged right between blind as a bat and gangly as hell. I can’t believe you’re gonna just sit there and _besmirch_ his good name. If he says there’s a pile of dead people under the house, then I for one believe the man wholeheartedly!”

“He didn’t—!” Julia grimaced before leaning towards him so she could lower her voice. “He didn’t say there were dead people under the house, you boob!”

Conrad raised his eyebrows. “… _boob?_ ”

Her look was nothing short of withering. “There aren’t bodies under the house.” After a beat, she turned over her shoulder to reassure their mother, “There aren’t bodies under the house.” She pretty much just mouthed it, clearly not wanting to attract the attention of the surrounding tables, and oh!

Oh!

Ohoho!!!

Had she paid attention during Sibling 101 even _once?!_ That was a mistake! And he’d been having…such a bad week.

“Okay, maybe not…but there’s def bodies _in_ _the walls_.”

Julia whipped back around to him at the same moment Mom widened her eyes. Dad, God bless him, just kept eating that fucking potato.

“ _Connie_.”

“Brad said that sometimes, during the construction of those old places, builders would get walled in—”

“Walled i—the place isn’t two hundred years old! It was built in like, the 60’s or something!”

“Lots of peyote in the 60’s. You get a little too peace-and-lovey, maybe you fall into a wall and—”

“People don’t—” she caught herself again, lowering her voice to a hiss. “People don’t just get sealed into walls!”

“Brad said they do.”

“You’re thinking of that stupid story from Lit… _The Cask of Amarillo_.”

“I think it was _Armadillo_.”

“ _I_ think you’re a—”

Potato seemingly finished, their dad sat back in his chair, tapping his thumbs pensively against the table. “Well hold on now…weren’t you saying something weird like that happened in the one you’re trying to sell, hon?”

Conrad froze.

Julia froze.

In the blink of an eye, in that special way only siblings seemed to be capable of, all the frustration and snark drained out of them; as they stared into each other’s faces, the only emotion either could see was confusion. Then, blossoming just as quickly, intrigue.

When they turned, it was a very different sort of look they saw on their mom’s face. She’d pulled one of her cheeks inward to chew on, calmly blinking as she stared their dad down from across the table. “I thought,” she said in the singsong that _always_ meant she was well on her way to pissed, “We weren’t going to talk about that.”

“Talk about what?!” he and Julia asked at the same time.

“Don’t—” Mom started…but it was too late. Far, far too late.

“Human soup guy.”

Julia’s entire body seemed to crumple inwards, as though her repulsion was a newly formed black hole pulling her towards its center, but where she shrunk back, Conrad only leaned forward. “Human. Soup. Guy.”

“Yeah.” And oh, that wasn’t the sort of thing you said before shrugging, yet lo and behold, that’s exactly what his dad did. “Some guy related to…right? Related to the old owner? Slipped and fell in the shower. Broke his neck!”

“Okay, I think that’s enough—”

“By the time they found him, the water’d been running for days! Over the long weekend, I think? Anyway, they couldn’t tell where the bathtub ended and he started!”

“I…” It all seemed to click a second later, Julia’s disgust momentarily swapped out for confusion. “Wait. Wh—Daddy, that doesn’t even make sense.”

Mom cleared her throat loudly and set her napkin on the table, _desperately_ trying to flag down their server for the check. “This is _not_ the time… _or the place_ —”

“Human soup,” Conrad repeated. “Dude stew.”

“ _Connie!_ ”

“Bathroom bisque.”

“I—okay, know what? I’m…I’m gonna go powder my nose or something. This is…this is just _not_ what I want to talk about on a full stomach, ugh!” Julia pushed herself away from the table with one last juvenile groan. She didn’t drop her napkin onto her plate so much as she flung it, shaking her head as she made her way towards the restaurant’s (no doubt swanky) restrooms.

And that was the _second_ moment the universe tossed his way, the _second_ moment he could’ve—and should’ve—realized something was up.

But no.

Oh no.

He was much, _much_ too enthralled by human soup guy to notice the way his parents carefully watched Julia’s retreat.

“So are you saying his bones _melted_ , or…?”

Before he could get any kind of closure vis à vis bathtub broth, Mom let out a tense sigh. “Was that _entirely_ necessary?” she asked as she whirled on Dad, her lips pressing tightly together.

As with any other such familial confrontation, he puffed himself out like an insulted show pigeon, widening his eyes in a melodramatic show of indignation. “What? You’re the one who almost let it slip—I was just changing the subject!”

Was there any demographic on Earth better at ruining a moment than parents? He thought not. All at once, every single event of the week came crashing down on him again to replace the joy human soup guy had inspired within his very soul. Where it once had been, now there was only a gurgling sort of fear that upset all the irresponsibly expensive steak in his stomach.

“Let, uh…let _what_ slip?” Conrad asked, raising his beer to his mouth before remembering it was empty.

His parents exchanged a look but said nothing. Not the best sign.

“Let _what_ slip?” he tried again, apprehension quickly getting the best of him.

Was this…oh God, was this a bad news dinner?! They _never_ did bad news dinners at the steakhouse! Usually that was a gastropub kinda deal, where the booze was stronger and the appetizers were weirder, but _fuck_ this was starting to feel like a bad news dinner all the same! His mind filled with an impossible number of family emergencies: his parents were getting a divorce, Dad’s firm was going bankrupt, someone was dying, someone was _pregnant…_ each possibility so much worse than the last!

“I don’t—”

“Oh come on, he can know! You can keep a secret, can’t you, son?”

Mom did nothing to mask her doubt. “I really don’t—”

Throwing a glance over his shoulder towards the restrooms, Dad chuckled. “Now, you don’t know _anything_ about this if it ever comes up—which it _shouldn’t_ …” he began, and Conrad was downright alarmed to find the grin on his face made him _more_ nervous instead of helping, “…but Alex came by earlier this week.”

His brow furrowed. He wished he had thought to ask for another beer the last time the server had been by. “…oookay? Uh, cool…?”

“He’s planning on proposing.”

His head swiveled to his mother as though it were on a ball bearing.

For a second the only things he could do were stare and try to make sense of the words that had just come out of her mouth. How…how could she say something of that magnitude so coolly? Where was the somberness, the _gravitas?!_

“Propose,” he said, the word feeling alien in his mouth, like a light bulb he’d managed to jam in there on a dare but couldn’t get out again. “Wait. Propose like…like _marriage,_ propose?!”

Mom rolled her eyes. “This is why I didn’t—”

“Wait, I… _when?!_ ” The world snapped out of slow-mo as he leaned over the table, lip curled not in joy or amusement but pure, unbridled shock and horror. “ _Soon?!_ ” Something in his brain hadn’t shut down exactly, but it had begun the process to be sure, a million metaphorical progress bars and error messages popping up to add to the chaos.

“No,” he thought he heard one of his parents say, “He said he was going to wait until their anniversary—”

But Conrad didn’t know their fucking anniversary! How was he supposed to know when their fucking anniversary was?! Was it in the spring? He thought he could remember it being vaguely spring…ish? Fuck, if that was true, then…Thanksgiving was coming up already, spring would be just around the corner, and…wait, what if it _wasn’t_ spring?! What if it was winter?! God, the only way he managed to remember Julia’s _birthday_ was by checking Faceboo—

Facebook! He could check Facebook! That would at least give him a timeframe to know when to expect the first phase of this madness, and if he could start preparing _now_ …

Marriage.

_Marriage?!_

He couldn’t so much as get the girl who sat next to him in sociology to _look_ at him, and his little sister—his _baby_ sister—was about to be engaged? _ENGAGED!_ To be _MARRIED!_

Oh. Oh this was not good. It was not good at all.

Something about the idea of Julia in a wedding dress, Julia being a Smith instead of a Bishop, Julia and Alex getting a house and registering for fancy kitchenware and having _kids_ …

No. Nope. Absolutely not. He was _not_ about to go down _that_ road, because _that_ road only let off in ‘Uncle Conrad Town,’ and yeah, okay, he was regretting eating all that fucking steak.

This was not right. This was not _correct_ —this wasn’t how stuff was supposed to work! He was the eldest sibling! He was the one supposed to do everything first! So what if he didn’t _want_ to do them—that just meant _Julia_ was supposed to not want to do them too! …at least not until he had a chance to change his mind, and…and sure, Alex was a good guy, and he liked him fine…he was a bit of a tight-ass, but he was dating _Julia_ , so obviously _that_ was a given…so it wasn’t like it was anything personal…except, yeah, okay, it absolutely was, because why the _fuck_ would he be thinking about proposing to Julia knowing _full well_ that she had an _older sibling_ who would look like an absolute _dipshit_ when he showed up to said hypothetical wedding alone, and…

Okay.

 _Okay_.

Know what? He could…he could do this. He could handle it. This was knowledge he could deal with and live with and be okay with. He just…well, he just had to find a way to make himself feel better about the whole thing, didn’t he? Yeah…yeah! _That’s_ what it was. He had to do… _something_ to reassert himself as the one in charge of things, the apex predator of the sibling hierarchy. And if in doing so Alex had second thoughts about marrying his ( _baby!!!_ ) sister, then so be it.

All he had o do was figure out what that _something_ was going to be. Or…

Ooh, _or_ …

 _Or_ he could get someone _else_ to do it, someone who would understand the eldest sibling dilemma, someone who never said no to scheming, someone, he knew, who would take the joke juuust far enough, if not maybe a step _too_ far.

Collecting himself, Conrad ran a hand through his hair, assuming a more casual posture. “Ah, well, cool,” he said, feeling the beginning of a devious plan taking root in the fertile soil of his brain. “Mum’s the word, cross my heart! But hey, uh, for real, what’s the scoop on human soup guy?”

His mother shot him a reproachful glare as the server set their check down, but he barely noticed it. As it stood, he was too busy coming up with a sales pitch.

See, he knew the man for the job just about as well as two people could know each other…which meant he knew _precisely_ what it would take to convince him to do what he needed him to do. He already had the mummy man in his pocket—now he needed human soup guy. He’d get that story! Oh, he’d get it. Conrad Bishop, again, was a man who did not back down and didn’t fold even when his hand was shit. He’d get the deets he needed to cobble together a decent enough proposal of his own, and then he’d see where the winds of fate chose to blow. He would. That wasn’t even a _question_.

But man oh man, that didn’t mean he was looking forward to dealing with Washington and his creepy buddies.

 _Fuck_ this week.


	2. A different kind of proposal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Conrad turns on the charm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time to meet some new friends...and reunite with some old ones ;)

Just like with everything else in life, there were pros and cons to being an extrovert. Now, in his experience, the pros usually outweighed the cons—being a people-person, after all, made outings like this a breeze and a half. There was no such thing as being ‘out of place;’ by God, he _made_ his place wherever he went, and if he walked in not knowing a single person, there was no question he’d leave with all of them knowing _him_. Shit, he’d been all finger guns and back-pats and dimples since he’d gotten to the shindig, dropping winks cracking wise at any given opportunity.

But though they might’ve been hidden, the downsides were there. Oh, they were there, all right. The only difference was that they usually weren’t _concepts._ No, usually they had _names_.

He could handle just about any person on the face of the Earth and melt through them like a hot knife through butter with little more than a boyish grin and a few well placed compliments, but every so often…every so often he’d run into someone who knew how to push back, and he’d been so caught up on gearing up to go head-to-head with Washington that he hadn’t even _considered_ he might run into _her_.

The girl from his sociology class.

It had all started innocently enough, really; someone had sat in his seat. His unassigned assigned seat. Now, where _he_ was from, there were societal rules that human beings were expected to live by, immovable as the Earth itself, and very near the top of that fucking list of mores and norms was ‘Thou shalt not sit in someone else’s lecture hall seat.’ That hadn’t stopped them, though. Oh no. And sure, he could’ve opted to be a dick about it, but the optics weren’t _great_ on being ‘that guy,’ so he’d taken the loss and chosen a similar (if not inferior) seat closer to the back of the room. Still on the end, though…always on the end. One never knew when they might get bored and need to bail to do something more important—like take a nap. Or get a burrito. Or just about anything other than listening to the professor’s TA drone on and on and on about the bystander effect.

Long story short, he’d plunked himself in a seat he’d never sat in before, and then _she’d_ come walking in, sitting a polite seat away from him, saying nothing but setting her bag down on the chair between them, and when he’d caught her eye and smirked and delivered one of his most suave ‘Hey’s, she hadn’t, uh…

She hadn’t really reacted, was the thing. She’d been looking right at him, _for sure_ , and he thought one of her eyebrows had cocked a bit, but…but then she’d just opened her notebook and stared straight ahead waiting for the lecture to start, and like…that was downright _intriguing_.

So…he’d kept sitting there. He was quickly coming to think of that seat near the back (the one at the very end of the row) as his _new_ unassigned seat, and okay, sure, maybe his mysterious neighbor hadn’t exactly _thrown_ herself at him yet, but his charm was unmatched! It was only a matter of time, really. Over the past few weeks he’d at least gotten her to lend him a pencil (a good sign), and he was pretty sure he saw her _almost_ smile when he made some hilarious quip about the weirdo kiss-ass in the front row that one time (also a good sign), so really they were pretty much on the verge of making it Facebook official.

Most importantly, though, he’d gotten her _name_.

…not _from_ her, sure, but he’d seen it on a returned quiz, and that was pretty much the same as an introduction, right? Sure it was! And that was the key to all this—that was _How to Win Friends and Influence People 101_ , baby! Names, names, names. People _loved_ it when you used their names. Won ‘em over real quick, made ‘em trust you just like that.

With all that in his pocket, pushback be damned, he was feeling pretty fucking good about his chances as he wandered his way towards the table where she was milling about, mixing herself a drink. He set down his beer and grabbed a cup for himself (casually as you please), reaching for one of the many, many assorted bottles of vodka before pretending he’d only just noticed her there. “Oh, hey! Felicity, right? We got soc—”

She raised her eyes from her drink, not even _acting_ like she was going to turn to look at him, instead simply looking right ahead of herself for a beat.

Wuh-oh. That was an expression he knew. That was _pre_ -exasperation—a JJ special if ever there was one—and _shit_ he’d literally only just started! What had he managed to fuck up in that time?!

The exasperation didn’t _leave_ her face, but it was toned down a good couple notches when she finally _did_ turn. “Fliss,” she said simply, “And yeah, we do.”

…off to a great start.

“ _Fliss_ ,” he corrected himself, making the transition smooth as butter as he continued making his drink.

That was five more words than she’d ever said to him before, and he’d take it! In their time as row-buddies, she hadn’t made it much of a point to raise her hand or answer the professor’s questions, so he had to admit he was _sort of_ surprised by the accent, but man oh man what self-respecting American citizen _didn’t_ love themselves a good accent now and again? An accent and—oh come on. He watched her give her cup a halfhearted swirl, and that’s when he saw the tattoos on her wrist.

An accent, the hard-to-get act, _and_ tats? Mother _fucker_.

Fliss was gonna be a _problem_. For him. Personally. She was checking too many of his boxes over here.

“Nice ink,” he said offhandedly, giving only the barest of nods in her direction.

“It is,” she agreed. It was hard to tell from his periphery, but he thought he might’ve spotted the _teeniest_ hint of a smile. Not on her mouth, obviously, but like, in her eyes. There was definitely a smile brewing in her eyes. He’d stake his life on it.

He finished making his drink and heaved a world-weary sigh, turning his back to the table to give himself a better view of the party at large. “Conrad, by the way.”

The exasperation was still present. It didn’t seem to want to budge all that much. _However_. He could see now that there was _unquestionably_ a smile in her eyes. Any second now it would begin its inevitable migration down to her lips. “I know,” she said in that same tone, perfectly and utterly devoid of any self-doubt. “This will shock you, but you’ve sort of made that _abundantly_ clear over the past few weeks.”

It did not actually shock him.

He did not think _she_ actually thought it would shock him.

“So! Gotta admit I didn’t exactly have you pegged as the sorta person willing to stoop to the level of these greasy little get-togethers.” He chuckled into his Solo cup, leaning against the drink table before flicking his other hand out dismissively. “Not exactly the highest form of entertainment over here…”

Her mouth did _something_ , but it still wasn’t a smile. Not _yet_. Soon! Not yet.

Fliss let out a quiet sigh, the sort that somehow managed to perfectly express ‘Well, I guess _this_ is what I’m doing now,’ before she half-sat on the arm of the nearby couch, one of her legs curling up under her, the other still brushing the floor. “Translation: What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” She didn’t punctuate it with a drink from her own cup as he might’ve suspected, but instead tapped one of her fingers on the plastic for a moment, watching him carefully.

It might’ve, he realized, been the first time he’d seen her look at him full-on instead of from the corner of her eye. She was very, _very_ pretty from the front. Not to say her profile wasn’t _fetching_ , because it was, but this was something else.

“I can’t help wondering,” she started, her cadence bouncing with the same sort of cool confidence he tried to speak with, “If that ever actually works for you.” When he didn’t immediately say anything, she cocked her head ever so slightly to the side and clarified, never dropping her eyes from his. “Mispronouncing people’s names and then immediately launching headfirst into clichéd pickup lines.”

Fuck. Yeah, she…she was going to be a problem, all right.

“I mean, clearly it _must_ , right? Or else you wouldn’t be doing it. At least I _hope_ you wouldn’t…” And… _aha!_ There it was, ladies and gents, boys and girls, an actual-factual smile. Now, was it a smile at his expense? Probably. Did it still count in the grand scheme of things?

You bet your sweet bippy it did.

Feigning insult, he pointed at himself with his free hand, quickly turning his head from one side to the other as though checking to see whether she was talking to someone standing beside him. “M-me? You think _I’m_ trying to pick you u—oh man, now this is an embarrassing misunderstanding. I was just trying to find a way to ease us past all that freshman math class ice-breaker crap, y’know? Skip wading through the shallows and dive right on into that ol’ conversational intercourse, that’s all. If you’re not interested, that’s fine…”

Fliss didn’t roll her eyes—not exactly—but they did flicker to the ceiling for half a second before she looked to him from over the rim of her cup. “Subtle.”

“Thank you, thank you, I pride myself on my subtlety, really. Just one of my many talents.”

She finished her drink and folded her arms to rest on her knee. And then, without missing a fucking beat, she sighed, “Too bad charm isn’t among them.”

Goddamn it! He wasn’t used to this! Someone matching him step for step? Oh, this was trouble with a capital T.

Despite himself, he knew he was grinning, and there was absolutely fuck-all he could do about it. “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. See, my charm’s like a boomerang…you _think_ it’s gone right over your head until… _pah!_ ” He smacked the side of his head and she snorted a laugh. “Knocks you out cold.”

“That makes…no sense.” Sense or not, there was no denying Fliss’s amusement by then, proving his point b-e-a-utifully.

“Sure it does!”

“It really doesn’t.”

“Uh huh, well, we’ll see about that. You just watch—you’re gonna be getting ready to leave this shithole tonight, and riiight as you step onto the porch, _bam!_ You’re gonna find yourself thinking, ‘Damn! I can’t believe I’ve been lucky enough to sit next to such a witty, charismatic, well-spoken, handsome—’”

She cleared her throat loudly enough to be heard over the chatter and music of the party, taking another slow drink from her cup.

Conrad shrugged, still grinning, and heaved a dramatic exhale. “You’ll see,” he said, only half-joking. “You’ll see. You know, I…”

A flash of movement from the other room caught his eye then, and he turned just in time to see…

“Goddamn it.”

Eyebrows arcing in a dull sort of surprise, Fliss blinked. “Excuse me?”

“No, I, uh…” Fuck. Leave it to Washington to slow his roll. What an asshole. Of course he would’ve chosen that _exact_ moment to pop into the kitchen before disappearing outside again. It only made sense—he was _always_ ruining his good time. “Sorry, uh…I just remembered I have to deal with something real quick, I…” So much for a graceful dismount. “If you wanna continue this conversation—” Fliss’s expression had gone back to being perfectly unreadable, and oh, he was going to take _that_ out on Washington to be sure, “—I’ll be riiight back. Like, five minutes, tops.”

Not the best way to win a lady over, but _shit_. This was a now or never kind of deal! He knocked back what was left in his cup before dropping it into the trash, picking up his beer from where he’d left it, and then made a beeline for the sliding glass door leading to the backyard.

He knew he had one shot with Washington— _one_. Had he been alone maybe it would’ve been a different story, but of course the whole fam-damily was sitting out there with him. All his loser ghost-hunting buddies, the (God help them all) Collegiate Researchers Examining Extranormal Phenomena Society: Hartley and Ash and…who the hell was that blonde?! Ugh, that didn’t matter. What _did_ matter was that, with that many eyes on them, he knew one shot was all he got.

See, much like him, Washington was nothing if not a goddamn showman. A master of the craft, really, and Conrad respected the shit outta that, but fuck if it wasn’t annoying as all hell. If he decided it would be funnier to leave him out in the cold than be an actual human being and help him, he would. And with blondie sitting next to him like that, the deck seemed unfairly stacked. Hartley and Ash were hardly more than glorified yes-men, but blondie? Blondie was a wild card. _Especially_ if Washington was looking to impress her.

He was going to have to pull out all the stops on this one. This called for full pitchman mode.

His plan of action began to take form in his head as he walked across the yard, one of his fingers tapping against the side of his bottle in an absentminded rhythm. They’d spotted him already of course, at least the Horror Harem had, so he made sure to put on his most winning smile as he heard Hartley call out, “Well, well, well! Look what the cat coughed up.”

At that, Washington’s posture shifted into more of a slouch. He didn’t turn at all—a shitty attempt at a power play if he’d ever seen one—but he gestured widely with his right hand, the ember of his cigarette burning brightly. “ _Bishop_ ,” he drawled in that nasally, toneless voice of his, “You better have my fifty bucks, you sunovabitch.”

Oh _that_ was a laugh. In all the many, many, _many_ years he’d been unfortunate enough to know him, the two of them had never (not even once) actually exchanged any sort of cash. Nuh-uh. No way José. Like hell was he ever going to let Washington spend his hard-earned money on fake blood and dead pigs or whatever it was he satiated his grim perversions with.

“You’re not getting jack _shit_ from me, man,” he said, taking a sip of his beer. Chugging his other drink had possibly been a mistake—already his head was starting to feel swimmy and his tongue slow. “I dunno how many times I have to tell you that…I’d rather upend my wallet into my aunt’s koi pond than lie awake at night thinking about _you_ spending my money.” He dropped himself into the only open chair left, planting himself smack-dab between Hartley and Washington, meaning of course, he was right across from the ladies.

Intentional? Perhaps.

He flashed both of _them_ a crooked smile, dimples on full display, and his confidence was more than bolstered by the wry amusement on their faces. Fliss might’ve been a challenge, but Ashley Brown was not Fliss. For all her eye rolling and know-it-all-ism, Ash was _incredibly_ easy to win over. Tell her she had a good point, nod when she said something smart, surprise her with a little of that downhome ‘aw shucks’ attitude, and she was putty. Blondie was an unknown for now. He had to figure he’d have a pretty solid read on her by the end of this conversation, but if nothing else, the fact that she was hanging out with these three assholes told him that she was half-past desperate for human contact, and that was as good a first step as he could’ve asked for.

“‘Sup creepazoids?” he beamed, “Guess they just invite _anyone_ to these shindigs nowadays…” Turning his attention more fully on blondie, he cranked the charm up to eleven, tipping his bottle towards her in a chummy salute. “New girl! Hey, level with me…how much did these dweebs have to pay you to get you to join the _Scooby Doo_ act? I, uh,” he slid his eyes to Washington and cocked an eyebrow, “Hope to Christ they’re at _least_ offering you dental benefits.”

Washington met his gaze unflinchingly, taking what Conrad was very sure was _supposed to be_ a dramatic, badass drag off his cigarette.

It was neither of those things.

Showman or not, Washington was a fucking dork. That shit was unavoidable. He was a scrawny film geek psych major who thought the bags under his eyes and the Kubrick posters in his bedroom made him a tortured artist or some shit like that. And like, fine, whatever, he was allowed to brand himself however the hell he wanted (not everyone could make that homegrown Bishop charisma work, after all), but considering he’d known the twerp since they were like…ten, it just wasn’t working. So he could smoke as much as he wanted—it didn’t change the fact that Wash would forever be the kid who bawled like a baby at the end of _The Iron Giant_ to him.

“Well, it’s funny you’d ask…” Blondie said, casually setting her elbows onto the table and leaning forward, her chin resting in her palms. “I haven’t been paid _anything_ yet…but I _was_ promised, oh what was it…fifty dollars?” Her eyes flicked to Washington and then back to him, and mother _fucker_ , she was going to be a problem after all, wasn’t she? Shit. Shitshitshit. Tonight was just full of surprises. Problematic surprises. “They keep telling me it’ll be any day now, though, so…fingers crossed.”

“Oh Jesus,” he groaned, slouching further down in his own seat. There was no point in pretending this was anything other than what it truly was: a pincer attack. “Glad you’ve found another one of your _kind_.” After a disappointed shake of his head, he dropped a wink to the other side of the table. “Ash.”

Her mouth did the purse-y thing it always did when she was deciding whether or not to humor him. “Hi Connie,” she said after a beat, telling him half of what he needed to know.

He tipped his bottle towards Hartley. “Chris.”

In a mocking mimicry of how Ash had said it, Hartley parroted, “Hi Connie,” telling him the _other_ half of what he needed to know.

“Dude,” he snickered, “C’mon.”

There was juuust enough of a snap in Hartley’s voice to sound all his jealousy alarms. “What? Suddenly I’m not on nickname terms? Rude, bro, très rude.”

Conrad _considered_ rolling his eyes. He _considered_ telling Hartley to cool it, that dorky pseudo-goth redheads weren’t really his thing, but in the end decided against it. This was supposed to be a business proposal, after all, and he knew from more than a decade of experience that antagonizing the Peanut Gallery was one of the quickest ways to trigger one of Washington’s bullshit _Joker_ monologues. So instead, he just fixed Hartley with a look and explained, “How’d _you_ feel if I started going around calling you _Cochise?_ ”

His grimace was almost immediate. “Eugh. Okay. Point taken. Comment retracted.”

“Uh huh.”

“Y’know,” Washington cut in, interrupting their back-and-forth, “I don’t remember inviting you to sit with us.”

And so it began. He pretended to frown even as he glanced down, plucking at his shirt from under the unzipped flaps of his jacket. “Shit,” he sighed, “Is it Wednesday already? And look at me, not wearing pink. My b, man, _super_ gauche of me, I know.”

There was a snort, and he felt Wash move into a familiar posture. The battle of wits, it seemed, was on. “Can’t pay his debts, but he _can_ crack wise! Is that what they teach you at the country club?”

“Look, I get it man, okay? I _get_ that you’re still salty over your family getting turned down for membership—shit’s gotta sting—but I _assure_ you, I didn’t have to learn _any_ of this shit. Pure genetics.” With a flourish, he waved to his own face as though to drive the point home. “Not all of us have to rely on our bank accounts to form a personality.”

“No,” Wash agreed, “Not all of us do. Why _you’re_ the one trying to make that point, though, is beyond me. I’m pretty sure the closest _you’ve_ ever come to a personality is switching from Natty Light to Sam Adams.”

Oof, that one actually almost hurt! Conrad thumped a hand against his own chest, “Uh, ouch?”

And _boom_ , there was the patented Washington smirk, hooked, barbed, pointed, whatever you wanted to call it. The routine was familiar, and fuck if it wasn’t sort of fun. “Hey, I’m just calling ‘em like I see ‘em. I know it can be hard for bottom feeders like you to get perspective on that kinda shit…”

“Bottom feeders, huh? Big talk coming from the guy who bought his first car with the money his pops made from _Blood-Soaked Tits: The Movie_.”

Washington held up a reproachful finger, waggling it side to side. “ _Rockabye Slaughterhouse_ , thanks.”

“Oh shit, how could I have forgotten that? It was so masterfully titled and everything.”

“I’m sorry, remind me where _your_ family’s mountain is?”

Ah, the mountain. Of course. It always came down to Blackwood in the end, didn’t it? Blah blah blah, my family owns a whole fucking mountain, blah blah blah. Well, _fine_ , they could _have_ their stupid mountain with its cool-ass ski lodge and million couches and giant-ass plasma screen tvs and its—

“…uh, this a mutiny?”

At the confusion in Wash’s voice, Conrad shook himself out of his own head, only realizing then how far from the two of them the other three had moved their chairs. They sat there across from them, watching like kids plopped in front of Saturday morning cartoons.

Blondie smirked before answering sweetly as could be, “We were just trying to get a better view of the pissing match.”

“Wanted to get out of the Splash Zone, more like…” Hartley added, nudging Ash with his elbow, no doubt trying to get her to laugh at that zinger.

Whoops. Yeah, they uh, they did sort of have a habit of getting sucked into their own banter sometimes, he could admit that much. But…shit, yeah, all right, this was supposed to be a business meeting, right, right. He had to get his head back in the game!

“It occurs to me that this really isn’t the kinda first impression I wanted to make on the new girl, creep squad.” He met Washington’s gaze again, raising both of his eyebrows in a not-so-silent challenge. “I’m getting the vibe you’re _trying_ to make me look like a tool.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. I’ve already heard allllll about you.” He didn’t bother asking blondie to clarify—he knew Wash and Hartley and Ash like a little kid knew the taste of their own boogers, so there was no question in his mind that they’d only chosen to tell her what would be the funniest for them and the least flattering for him.

Which, again, was fine.

Honestly, it’s what he would’ve done in their place.

She just kept going though, offering him a half-wave from the other side of the table. “I’m _Sam_ , just FYI. New Girl’s only my stage name.”

Ah, okay, okay, his radar was beeping and booping all over the place. Probably harder to win over than Ash, definitely feisty, but he could deal with that. “Oh shit, you’re quick! Watch out, buddy-boy,” he drawled, leaning over so he was more or less using Washington as an armrest, “This one’s gonna sniff through _your_ bullshit in about point-five seconds. Gonna run you out of town. Good luck with that.”

He shoved him off of him and back into his rightful seat. “Eat me, dude.”

“Appreciate the offer, but you’re so not my type.”

That same flicker of mischief sparked in his eyes, only for Ash to do what she did best—immediately derail whatever fun was going on. “Not to be ‘that guy,’ but we were _kinda_ talking about important stuff before you came sauntering over—”

“Sauntering? Not strutting?” he asked, offering her another sweet-as-pie smile if only to watch Hartley bristle in his periphery.

She flapped her hand like a sock puppet that time around, clearly done humoring him. “If we could get back to that, well that would just be _great._ ”

And there it was. Laid out for him on the table like a cloche being pulled away to reveal a decadent dessert. He couldn’t show his hand…not that quickly. So instead of launching right into his spiel, Conrad just nodded, swirling his bottle like JJ swirled her wine. “Ah. Important stuff, you said?”

The breath she let out wasn’t a sigh. It was very, very close to one, however. “Yeah.”

“Like… _super_ important stuff?”

“Extremely.”

“Business-type stuff, I’d imagine?”

She blinked once in his direction, slowly and deliberately. It didn’t look entirely unlike how his aunt’s cat would stare at a toy mouse before attempting to disembowel it with its hind legs. “Yes, Conrad, business-type stuff.” She was never as fun to spar with as Washington was. Fucking English majors, man. No respect for the craft.

“Sooo…” he glanced around the table, “ _Ghosts_.” He held for a moment, letting the silence drag on for precisely the right amount of time before… “Well hey! It’s your lucky day, creepy crawlies! Because believe or not, that’s _exactly_ why I’m here!” Setting his arms down on top of the table, he drummed both sets of his fingers once, assuming a more conspiratorial tone. Make ‘em think they were all in this together—that was always the first step of sealing a deal. “See, I spotted you guys out here, just…absolutely _haunting_ this yard like a bunch of socially stunted gargoyles, and as soon as I saw you, I thought to myself ‘What luck!’ It’s serendipitous, really, shit like this doesn’t like up every da—”

Beside him, Washington went limp in his seat, head lolling back on his shoulders. “Oh my _God_ , get _on_ with it!” he groaned, coming unnecessarily close to smacking him upside the head with his cigarette hand in the process.

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “So here’s the thing,” he said instead, “Mom’s got this _sick_ property a couple counties over. Can’t move it.” This was the part where Ash’s insatiable need for answers would kick in, or maybe Hartley’s constant search for a punch line, and one of them would ask _why_ it was that no one was buying the house, only…

Only none of them did. The four of them continued to stare at him, sure, most with their arms folded, a great many raised eyebrows between them, but no one asked the question.

He turned to Ash and raised his own eyebrows. She held his gaze but said nothing. So he turned to Hartley, who…held his gaze but said nothing. Then to Sam, then, who, surprise, held his gaze and said nothing. And then, already knowing what he’d find, he turned to Wash, who didn’t even bother looking back at him as he snickered to himself. Asshole.

Conrad dropped his eyes to his beer, already working on patching together a Plan B. “Ask me why,” he said under his breath, taking a swig to buy himself some thinking time.

There was a horribly long pause as he drank, and he was so fucking sure he was going to have to come at this from a completely different angle…and then Sam, God bless that little button-nose of hers, spoke up. “Fine,” she sighed, “ _Why_ can’t she sell it?”

The other three groaned as though they were some pasty Greek chorus.

Oh, he could salvage this. “Shut it. You guys are gonna be singing my praises to the very heavens themselves when you hear this shit.” Smooth as silk, his posture slid back into what it had been before, all open body language and trustworthy grins. “Get this…the land used to be a fucking _gallows_ in the old days, right? Where people were executed and shit…”

Ash wasted no time in poking holes in his (well, _Brad’s_ , really) story. “And now it’s a _house_. Really.”

“ _Really_. You know how it goes, the place got razed, they started putting in all these huge-ass houses for the rich SOBs who didn’t _care_ about the loss of human life, blah blah blah…” He took another quick drink, then effortlessly slid into the pitch he’d cobbled together over the past couple nights, hoping against hope that Sam wasn’t any better at sniffing out bullshit than the others were. “But no, see, according to Mom’s people, back in like, the 60’s, a new family moved in, went to renovate the basement, and they found this bricked-over room down in the old wine cellar—”

“Let me guess,” Ash cut him off, smashing her cheek against the heel of her hand as she leaned against it, still watching him with those big, raccoon-ringed eyes of hers. “And then they found a body. Totally mummified. Probably because there wasn’t any airflow through the bricks.”

…fuck. Oh fuck him _sideways_. How did…

There was no way in hell he wasn’t making a face. Making faces wasn’t usually part of the sales pitch, no one really wanted to buy shit from you if you were shaking like a Chihuahua in the wind, but goddamn it, were they fucking mind-readers now? Was that was this was?

“I—shit, what?” Oh yeah, real slick, Bishop. Real professional. He cleared his throat and tried to put on a more neutral expression. “You’ve already heard about—”

Ash literally threw her hands into the air. “You’re describing _The Cask of Amontillado_ , oh my _God_.”

Amontillado! _That’s_ what it was! He _knew_ Julia had been wrong—wait, okay, no, that didn’t actually matter right now. “No I’m not! This is real!”

Washington laughed at that, one of the loud, barking caws that came out of him when he was surprised by a quality joke. “ _Christ,_ man, are you fucking—”

No. No! He wasn’t about to let himself be derailed before he could get to the good shit! “This place has had like twenty different owners in the past fifty years!” he lied, pouring every ounce of his charisma into it and praying it would somehow come across as earnestness. “It’s _totally_ legit! The stories, I mean. Not the like…ghoulies coming out to play hopscotch with the kids or whatever.”

“There’s no way that’s a real story. People don’t just find mummies in their basements.”

Why was everyone being so harsh on the info Brad had given him?! If Brad Smith, he of the well-polished glasses and protected pockets said that sometimes there were mummies in the walls of old houses, then Jesus Christ, there were probably mummies in the walls of old houses!

“Sure they do!”

The look on Ash’s face was hard to pick apart, but what she said next filled him with more relief than any one word ever had before: “Connie.” Was she exasperated? Sure. Was she fed up with him? No question. If he was still ‘Connie’ instead of ‘Conrad,’ though…that meant she hadn’t decided against him yet.

Which meant he still stood a chance.

If he had Ash, then he had Hartley, simple as that. Guy was like a kicked puppy following after her; her word was fucking _law_ , so long as he thought a nice, soft pat on the head was even a _possibility_. And if he had Ash and Hartley, then he was already more than halfway to winning over Washington. For all his bluster and bullshit, he was the quote-unquote leader of their group about as much as Julia was a Kardashian—which was to say he sure _wished_ he was, and maybe he liked to _think_ he was, but at the end of the day he was just another dork sitting on the sidelines waiting for someone bigger and louder to pick him for their team. Sam, though…well, he still didn’t know what to expect from her. Not just yet.

“There’s a _reason_ people hate basements and attics, Ash,” he said, doubling down as he opened his hands to her. “And that reason is sometimes you find bodies in them. So here’s what I’m saying…I can get you the keys to a purportedly _crazy_ -haunted mansion. That no one can sell. That’s been through a _stupid_ number of owners. Where there’s at _least_ a _legend_ of a crawlspace mummy. _And_ ,” oh, here was where it started getting tricky, “As long as you don’t go listing off the address or straightup name-drop my mom’s agency, I can guaran-goddamn-fucking-tee you get all the time, space, and B-roll you could ever ask for. You want full access? All floors? Done. You want to scope the property itself? Poke through the dirt for…I don’t know, bone shards or whatever? Done. You want to do an overnight without worrying about the cops getting called? Done. All of this…” Sitting back, he spread his arms out wide, a magnanimous (and handsome) king to his supplicants, “ _I will give to you_. Free of charge.”

The lawn went quiet then, except for the mechanical inhale-exhale sound of Washington’s smoking. “ _But_ …”

“But nothing. I’m simply extending an offer to you, my friends, to help in your burgeoning paranormal busin—”

Wash leaned back further in his seat, watching him from over the glowing orange eye of his cigarette. “ _But…_ ” he repeated.

They sat there like that for a hot second, neither blinking, both searching the other’s face, heels dug into the metaphorical dirt as they waited to see which would fold first. It wasn’t until a muted peal of laughter cut through the darkness that he remembered there was a party going on inside and he had, uh…fuck, yeah, okay, he had absolutely told Fliss this would be a five-minute dealie, hadn’t he?

Fine. _Fine_. He could be the one to blink this time around—honestly, that might make Washington _more_ likely to go along with it. Guy was a fucking sadist like that sometimes. “ _But_ …I have two itty bitty conditions.”

He watched Washington’s eyes flick to Sam, and in that moment he knew his suspicions had been right on the mark. Motherfucker was abso-fucking-lutely trying to charm blondie. Good. Good!

He’d remember that for later.

“Shock of shocks. Rule _numero uno_ when it comes to dealing with the Conman, over here? Check that fine print _right_ upfront.” When he swiveled back around, Conrad could see in his face that he’d already won. “Out with it, ya goddamn _goon_ …”

Not wasting any time, he stuck a finger up. “One. I need your assistance spooking a certain someone.” A _very_ certain someone. “At a later date, of _course_. No rush on that one.” He put up a second finger. “Two.” This was where there would be friction. “I want in.”

Wash didn’t even deign to change his expression. “No,” he said flatly.

“I—”

“ _No_.”

This was bullshit. And he didn’t mean in the ‘aw man, this is so unfair’ way either—no, it was literal bullshit. He was being bullshat. And there was a saying about bullshitting bullshitters, and if Washington thought he could out-bullshit _him_ , King of Bullshit Mountain, then he was shit outta luck. “Fine!” Conrad said cheerfully, widening his smile until it touched the muscles of his face he usually reserved for only the most special of occasions, “Cool! If you don’t want this sick, creepy-ass mansion _full_ of dusty old paintings and moldy bed sheets…just… _chock-full_ of bad juju and opportunities to get clicks, then by all means…”

That time, Washington _did_ hold his gaze. And oh, hold it he did. With both hands, even. Held it as a preschooler might hold a baby chick on a school field trip to a farm—not wanting to drop it but also not wanting to wait and see if it would shit all over him. A second later, he was stamping his cigarette out on the table, shaking his head as though disappointed in himself. “Team meeting,” he droned, “Plug your ears and hum or something, blondie.”

Conrad snickered to himself and nestled more comfortably into his chair…until he realized the ‘blondie’ remark had been aimed at _him_ and not _Sam_. “Oh! Of course, of course! I know how it goes…” With a flippant wink in Sam’s direction, he made a grand show of cupping his hands over his ears, humming to himself as they held their little powwow.

Perfect. This was perfect. Maybe they’d gotten off on a rocky start, but if there was one thing he knew these idiots couldn’t turn down, it was the opportunity to get material for their stupid YouTube channel. Their ghost-hunting venture was…well, a kind word for it would be ‘ _embarrassing_ ,’ but once they set their minds on something, that was that.

He didn’t actually think they were going to find anything spooky in the house his mom was trying to sell. If they found anything scarier than a patch of moldy wallpaper he’d eat his own sock, but…in that development, all of the houses had similar building plans. If they got nice and comfortable with the layout of the _empty_ house, then when it came time to mess with dear, sweet Alex and his precious bride-to-be in their place down the street, then…

A snippet of their conversation reached him through his (admittedly quiet) humming. “…Conrad never knows what he’s talking about—”

“Hey!” he called out.

“I don’t hear you humming, Bishop!”

Rolling his eyes, he considered making a wisecrack of his own…and instead nearly fell backwards out of his chair in alarm when _pop-pop-pop!_ Three of the bulbs strung up above them _exploded_ , showering the table and the tops of their heads with shards of glass.

The other four jumped and yelled just like he had, all of them shielding their faces with their hands and only peeking through their fingers to try and get a handle of the situation. There was a beat, an uncomfortable stretch of calm that brought to mind that old movie standby (‘It’s quiet… _too_ quiet…’) and then a fourth light popped further down the string, followed by the sound of glass hitting the dry, packed grass.

He couldn’t help it—he had to laugh. With all of them looking his way again, he jerked a finger up to the string of lights, moving his eyebrows up and down a couple of times in a smarmy display. “Hey, I dunno about you guys, but that sure feels like paranormal activity to _me!_ ”

“Shut up, man,” Hartley muttered, still brushing pieces of glass off of his shoulders.

“The spirits have spoken! They want you to take me up on this sweet, sweet offer…”

Instead of answering, the four grouped themselves into their huddle again, leaving him alone to nurse his beer. …and, okay, maybe check his own hair a couple more times for more glass. He glanced at his watch, grimaced, looked over his shoulder towards the sliding glass door in hopes of catching even the _slightest_ _peek_ of Fliss, and…

“All right, _all right_ …” Washington turned around to face him, doing that thing he did when he thought he was being all dramatic, keeping his face totally blank. He didn’t buy it, not for one goddamn second, but he let him _think_ he did, all the same. “We have stipulations.”

He tried not to let his glee show on his face. That would never do. “I’m sure you do.” Then, as an afterthought, “You _always_ do.”

Another beat passed between them, but he could see Sam and Ash exchanging girl-looks in his periphery, the kind that involved half-smiles and flouncy shrugs, and he knew he had the CREEPs right where he fucking wanted them.

After what seemed like twenty minutes, Washington stuck his fist out towards him. “This better be good as _shit_ , Connie,” he said, putting extra emphasis on the nickname, knowing _full fucking well_ what buttons he was pressing.

But whatever. He’d survived, what, a decade of Wash’s edgelord idiocy already—he could deal with whatever ‘stipulations’ his dorky crew had in mind if it meant scaring the literal piss out of Alex.

“Have I _ever_ let you down before, J-man?” he smirked, knocking their knuckles together. “ _Please_. I’ll have my people call your people and we can get this all squared away! Trust me…you’re gonna _love_ this.”

Oh, there was no better feeling than a plan coming together…no better feeling on _Earth_.

Except, of course, the feeling that reared its head when he finally slipped away from the ghostly geeks to rejoin the party and found that Fliss hadn’t left yet.

Maybe that one came close.

_Maybe_.

A little bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so spooky month continues!!! God, after writing in the tone/voice of The (Almost)s for so long, I don't think I'll ever be able to express to you guys how ridiculously fun it is to write from Conrad's POV, so I hope YOU'RE having fun reading it ;P
> 
> Hope you guys are basking in all that cinnamon and pumpkin spice, and most importantly TAKING CARE OF YOURSELVES <3


	3. What goes bump in the night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Conrad has a plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so here we are again!!! I haven't forgotten about these dorks ;P
> 
> A really, really quick note, not that anyone asked: I puh-ROMISE that I'm not gonna make you guys read the same fic twice. Pinky swear. We've got mayyyyybe one more little chunk of familiar ground to tread, and then we'll be in a post-Blackwood world! I realized as I was working on this one that like, HUH, sure hope...no one thinks...this is going to be a carbon copy of the first.
> 
> Connie's got a storm comin' guys. Grab those umbrellas.

Driving with the CREEPs had been absolutely out of the question. Full stop. Period. End of sentence. Number one: He wasn’t about to get into that Mystery Mobile of Hartley’s, the second- or maybe even thirdhand piece of shit minivan that screamed of playdates gone by—no thanks. Number two: If he was gonna be spending the night with these dorks, he needed to squeeze in as much Conrad-time as possible before those floodgates opened. Number three (and this was probably the real heart of the matter): He knew he wouldn’t’ve been able to control his face as they zipped by Alex and JJ’s place.

Nope. Could not. In fact, even as _he_ drove by it, all by his lonesome, he couldn’t help the way his eyes stuck to it, making his head turn until it was out of view again.

Their mom was out of her goddamn mind, calling that place a—wait, what had she called it again? A drafty…rickety thing? Some garbage like that. If _that_ was her idea of drafty and rickety, by God he didn’t want to know what she’d think of his apartment in The Willows. She might actually go full fainting-couch on him, ‘Fetch the smelling salts!’ and all that jazz. But here? He hadn’t been lying when he told the nerds that this was where the rich SOBs had decided to set up shop; as a rich SOB himself, he felt especially qualified in his assessment that if even _one_ of these suburban monstrosities didn’t have an in-ground pool in the back, it was only because the owners had filled it in to start the process of paving their own tennis court.

He jammed his turn signal on the second the understated-but-sophisticated (Mom’s words, not his) realty sign planted in the front yard caught his eye, slowing his roll so his ectoplasmic entourage would get the picture.

“Heeere we go…” Conrad muttered under his breath as his car smoothly glided into the driveway. He went to kill the engine, realizing with a snicker that he’d been humming the _Ghostbusters_ theme to himself. “Oooh Jesus…oh God help us all, it’s contagious.” That got another laugh out of him—more of a snort, really—and count that as number _four_ on his list of reasons why he was glad he hadn’t shown up to this song and dance with the creepazoids.

His eyes flicked to the rearview and he watched them begin the no doubt _arduous_ task of maneuvering the minivan into the driveway in reverse, and while that might’ve been its own kind of entertainment, he had a good fucking feeling he’d be getting more than his fair share of Schadenfreude out of them tonight. Instead of watching, then, he unhooked his phone from its dock on his dashboard, unbuckling his seatbelt and sinking lower into that plush, buttery leather seating as he checked his texts.

JJ  
  
Did you touch any of my stuff the last time you were here?????????  
  
Hello?  
  
Hellooooooooooooo?????  
  
Omg why would I take any of your stuff?  
  
Because you’re a little sneak thief who doesn’t know how to keep his hands TO HIMSELF!  
  
Now slow your roll there princess  
  
What’s missing?  
  
My favorite bracelet  
  
What, the black and silver one?  
  
OBVIOUSLY that one!!!  
  


He reached down to the cup holder in his center console, popping the lid off his water bottle before bringing it to his mouth to take a drink, all the while pretending he didn’t see the _lovely_ bracelet tucked away in the second divot. Was it black and silver? Hmm. Hard to tell, hard to tell…maybe if the person viewing it perhaps…squinted a certain way, or tilted their head to the side…or just kinda…looked at it.

JJ  
  
Oh man that sucks  
  
Haven’t seen it though  
  
Uh huh  
  
Just like you haven’t seen any of the other stuff that’s gone missing around here  
  
SNEAK THIEF!!!!!  
  
Look under the bed, lost shit always ends up under the bed  
  
It’s like…a law of physics or some shit  
  


Ah, but Julia wasn’t the reason he’d checked his texts. Don’t get it twisted—her being snippy about her stupid bracelet was fan-fucking-tastic because it told him without really _telling_ him that she hadn’t noticed his car drifting through her neighborhood like a shark cruising for a school of sardines—but nonono, see, there was a _different_ message he’d been hoping for.

Fliss  
  
It’s due the Tuesday before break, I just checked.  
  
Cool cool cool, all the time in the world then  
  
So you got any fun weekend plans?  
  
All work and no play yadda yadda  
  


He sucked his teeth at the lack of response. Now, true, getting her number had been, oh, chef’s kiss, _fantastic,_ but it seemed the charm boomerang hadn’t hit yet, huh? It was probably still whizzing its way through the air, just _thuppita-thuppita-thuppita_ , zeroing in on its target like one of Cupid’s arrows. It would get there! Oooh, it would get there! It just…

Well, it hadn’t quite gotten there!

 _Yet_.

His thumbs hovered over his phone’s keyboard as he thought of something witty to say, something that wouldn’t come off as skeevy or desperate or—

_BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG!_

“ _Jesus fucking Chr—_ ” There was a pathetic noise as his phone tumbled out of his hands, half-fumbled, half-flung, and he dropped both of his hands onto his thighs, shaking his head and staring straight through his windshield as Washington continued to pound on the window only inches from his head.

Regardless of what they found (or didn’t find) in that stupid house, there’d be a haunting by the end of the night, all right. He was going to kill him.

He blinked once, twice, and then let his eyes roll towards the window. When Wash met his gaze, still knocking of course, Conrad pressed the back of his own hand to the glass, slowly raising his middle finger. It got him to stop knocking, but man alive it started him off guffawing like a goddamn goon, and honestly? Not a whole lot better.

Grumbling, he bent down to search the footwell for his phone, grabbing it up before jerkily opening the door, managing to get in a good, solid _thwack_ to Wash’s side. “Insufferable, that’s what you are. In-fucking-sufferable.”

“Baby’s first five-syllable word! Color me impressed.” Asshattery or not, he hadn’t been raised in a barn, that Josh Washington—he offered one of his fists and Conrad knocked his knuckles against it, only _sliiightly_ harder than friendly greetings usually called for. “Gotta hand it to you, Bishop…I was kinda expecting we were gonna pull up to nothing short of Grandma’s house, doilies in the windows and everything. This, uh…” he paused just long enough to cast a judgmental look about the property, “…this is not that.”

“Pretty sick, right?” He locked his car and slid his phone into his back pocket, glancing over his shoulder for only a moment to watch the rest of the geek squad struggle under the weight of unloading their equipment.

“Eh, I wouldn’t go that far,” Wash chuckled, jamming his hands into his pockets as he continued to look around. “You sure Mommy isn’t gonna get her panties all in a bunch over this? Us sneaking around and putting our grubby mitts on everything we see?”

“How about you save the snappy shit for the camera, how about _that_ , man?”

Houses Washington and Bishop went back a ways, their storied meeting taking place right around the time Big Bob Washington himself had hit it big in the movie scene. Conrad was still a little fuzzy on the details of who, what, where, when, why, and how the blood pact or whatever had been formed (he had a suspicion it had something to do with investments or stock portfolios or some shit like that), but the moral of it all was the same: There hadn’t been a family holiday since as far back as he could remember that Josh wasn’t there, his lame-ass friends close in tow. His sisters too, but uh...well. Hmm. Aaaaaanyway, it was for that reason that he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would _not_ keep the snappy shit for the camera. Wash was, in no uncertain terms, _incapable_ of holding his lips together for more than thirty seconds at a time.

Except miracle of miracles, either someone upstairs had been listening or he was just _real_ invested in putting on a good show for blondie, because their outdoor filming was carried out with the snark kept to a bare minimum.

It was magical, really, watching the change that came over those dorks when they were working on their stupid show. On the best of days—the absolute _best_ —there were maybe two functioning brain cells between them, and even then, both of them were usually being used by Ash to memorize some sort of obscure literary trivia. But when it came to their pointless ghost hunting show, get out of the way! They moved like a well-oiled machine, setting cameras up for the best angles and shooting where the sunlight was best. It was almost impressive. Impressive in a decidedly pathetic way, sure, but like…impressive.

“So this is it, huh?” Sam asked as she joined him in front of the house, the others having already carted the king’s share of the equipment inside. “Crossing the threshold into Mummy Mansion. Well…definitely looks big enough to be hiding some ghoulies, I’ll give it that.”

He glanced up from his phone (and by extension the text thread he’d been trying to telepathically will Fliss to answer for the past twenty minutes or so). “ _Really_ wish you wouldn’t call it that,” he muttered, shoving his phone into his pocket again as he resigned himself to just not getting an answer. “Seriously ruins the ambiance of the situation.”

Having reached his daily recommended intake of goodwill towards man, Wash piped in from right behind him, “And what ambiance would that be, exactly? Because, uh, the spookiest part of this shit is the three-car garage, my dude.”

“You know, I seem to recall you saying you were _desperate_ for help finding locations for this flop of a—oh, whoop, okay then…” He took a step back as Sam, seemingly done with their conversation, took it upon herself to head inside and leave the two of them on the stoop.

“Is _that_ how you remember it?” Washington droned, “Because I seem to recall _you_ accosting us at a party and _begging_ that we come to this dump with you.”

“Begging? Begging.” He scoffed as loudly and derisively as he was able to (which turned out to be both _very_ loudly and _very_ derisively). “First off, I don’t beg. Especially not the likes of you.”

He kept scanning the property and the surrounding development, pulling one of his hands out of the pocket of his sweatshirt just long enough to flap his hand in his general direction.

Conrad grabbed the hand puppet in question and twisted it until Wash pulled away, giving him a good parting smack in the process. If any of the neighbors had been watching, he had to figure it would’ve looked, uh, not all that different from the slap-fights they’d gotten into as kids. “Let me humor you— _humor_ you. Explain to me what _I’m_ getting out of this arrangement, okay? Because let’s be real here, sure seems to me like you guys are the ones benefiting from this arrangement…”

“Oh, you mean besides your whole ‘I need you guys to scare someone for me’ thing?” Josh asked in an insulting (if not unpleasantly decent) impression of Conrad’s voice. “You get to tag along and pretend like you have friends for a night, so—”

That earned him a _harder_ smack, but he pulled away just in time. Trying not to sputter, his laughter turned indignant. “O-oh, I can _pretend_ like I have fr—fuck you, asshole.”

“Call ‘em like I see ‘em.”

“Newsflash dickwad, people _love_ me.”

Washington raised his eyebrows. He said nothing.

This house was getting a new ghost tonight, no fucking question.

“Know what? _I_ …” he drawled, yanking the front door open, “…don’t have to stand here and take this from you.”

“Sounds like someone’s feeling a little self-conscious all of a sudden.”

“This is why people hate psych majors, you get that, right? _This?_ This moment right here? This is why everyone rolls their eyes in class when it’s icebreaker time and you go ‘Hi, I’m Josh, and I went into psych because I’m just really, really good at _reading people_.’”

“Awful lot of talk for someone whose feelings aren’t hurt.”

Oh, he just had to remind himself of the long con. This was a necessary evil, a building block for what was to come. This was the metaphorical five bucks he had to fork over to partake of the all-you-can-eat spooktacular later, so he could grin and bear it for now.

“I mean, I can’t blame you…it’s probably one hell of a treat to be able to surround yourself with people as compassionate and entertaining as we are, especially considering that rancid personality of yours.”

…yeah, he could grin and bear it for now, but he was absolutely murdering Wash later. With his bare hands. He was going to count how many different colors his face turned as he strangled the life out of him. His bet? Six.

He held his gaze for a moment longer, unwilling to so much as blink until he was inside the house. Then, to prove precisely _how_ mature he was, he proceeded to slam the front door shut in his face, exhaling a relieved breath in the silence that followed. Conrad tugged his coat off and tossed it onto the stairs leading up from the entryway; the action felt unnaturally natural, if that made any sort of sense. He wasn’t sure why he was surprised…like, no duh it felt as though he was walking into Julia and Alex’s place—that was the whole point of this ordeal, wasn’t it? If the CREEPs got a solid feel for this place tonight, then it would be that much easier for the _real_ job to be an in-and-out kinda deal later. Let them find the nooks and crannies to hide and hook up their fakey-fake bullshit _now_ …reap the benefits _later_. A stellar plan on his part, really. Genius, almost.

A gust of wind blew his shirt hard against his back as Wash yanked the door back open, charging in with nary a sidelong glance his way. He did, however, manage to sneak in a horribly accurate backhand right under Conrad’s ribs, making him grunt and double over in surprise. “Hey, we’re starting in the basement, right?” he called up towards CREEP HQ, his mouth hooking into a smirk.

Leaning into view against the upstairs railing, something that looked suspiciously like an insulated lunchbox hanging from a strap on her shoulder, Ash offered up a smirk of her own. “That _is_ where Conrad said we’d find our mummy, sooo…”

Long con or not, he was _not_ about to stand here and get picked on by a bunch of AV Club nerds LARPing as Mystery Inc. “I didn’t say _we’d_ find a mummy, I said _someone already found_ a mummy!”

Half-pushing, half-shoving (at least until blondie joined them and Washington went back to being a dark, mysterious edgelord), they made their way down into the basement, walking carefully on the stairs. Everything in the house was well built, that wasn’t the issue, but without any carpeting or finish of any kind, the stairs felt a little…questionable. Rounded at the ends, maybe, and definitely, uh, made out of concrete. Or cement. Or both? Maybe both. Either way, they looked like they’d give you a hell of a bonk if you were unlucky enough to slip on them.

In his visits to the lovebirds’ nest, he couldn’t say he’d spent a whole lot of time in the basement. Like Julia and Mom had said during the dinner that started this whole fucking mess, the basements in this development were, uh…

Creepy! Creepy was the word. Hence the CREEPs.

“Yo, Conman,” Wash said, interrupting his surreptitious look around the place, “Your mom ever mention any of the previous owners using this place as a sex dungeon? Because let me tell you, I am… _feeling_ that vibe.”

Ash’s disgust was palpable. “Josh, oh my God, could you not?”

“Could we get some lights down here maybe? I—” Both of the girls (and okay, _maybe_ someone else, though they would remain nameless) gasped when Wash pulled the cord to the overhead light, plunging them into darkness. “Helpful,” Sam said flatly, “Mature. Professional.”

It wasn’t that he was afraid of the dark or anything like that—because he _wasn’t_ —but he did not, under any circumstances or stretch of the imagination, trust these freaks out of eyeshot.

That didn’t turn out to be such a huge problem after all. As it turned out, the stairs weren’t the only janky part of the basement’s setup: something about the doorframe didn’t fit precisely right. It let a sliver of light from the entryway shine through, meaning once his eyes adjusted, he could see a bit more than he first thought. The Scooby Squad continued to act like buffoons, all of them bumping into each other in the dark until the recording light of Hartley’s camera popped on and Wash started rambling on about spirit boxes and communicating with the other side and blahdie, blahdie, _blah_.

Then one of them flipped _something_ on and the world _exploded_ into shrieking, ear-bleeding, brain-shattering static. That time he didn’t pretend—he jumped like a cat getting its tail stepped on, yowling just about as loudly. “Holy _shitballs!_ ”

For his part, Wash kept on his ghost host with the most bullshit, saying, calmly as could be, “Now, just to make sure none of what we’re saying affects what she’s hearing in the radio signals, she’s going to have these noise canceling headphones on…whenever she hears something from the box, she’ll call it out to us, right, Ash?”

In the silence that followed, Conrad blindly felt his way over towards Hartley, trying to position himself so he could get a halfway decent view of the camera’s display screen. Through it, he could see Wash and Ash, both perfectly eerie in the green light of night vision, their eyes made beady and black.

Another few seconds passed without Ash responding, and Sam cleared her throat from somewhere behind them. “Well. At least we know the headphones work.”

On the display, Wash paused, his forehead wrinkling. “Oh. Right. Uh. We’ll…fix that in post.”

Conrad couldn’t help but snort—and loudly, at that.

“Hey! Are you guys gonna leave me hanging the whole night?!” Ash snapped, way whinier than any tv psychic _he’d_ ever seen. He could see her in the monitor, holding one side of the headphones away from her head, and even over the shrillness of her voice he could hear that awful static escaping from the headphones’ cup. “I’m already getting a headache! Can we get on this with? _Puh-lease?_ ”

He snorted again, quieter that second time, and began a slow circle around the main room of the basement. He made sure to keep the glowing square of Hartley’s display in his periphery to serve as a sort of buoy in case he got turned around in the dark. Was this what the others’ basement was set up like? He had to figure it was…like, if the rest of the house followed the same plan, then the basement would too, wouldn’t it? Stood to reason, at least.

Conrad walked along the back wall, skimming his hand along the exposed brick as he went, careful to test each of his steps before he put his full weight down. The floor was, much like the stairs, duh, made of cement or something like it, ancient dust crackling under the soles of his shoes as he walked. Whatever these people had used it for, he couldn’t say (hell, maybe Wash had a point with the whole sex dungeon thing, he could see it…), but the plan for the other house’s basement was to turn it into a gym.

Probably.

That sort of sounded right.

He hadn’t really been paying attention when JJ had started rambling about it.

Paying attention wasn’t really his thing.

As he walked, the CREEPs kept doing their stupid ghost stuff (“Is there anyone here with us? If there’s anyone—” “Sunday.” “Saturday, actually. You’re a little early, whoever you are! Do you have a name?” “Time. Go in. Apple.”), Hartley and blondie dark blobs behind the camera, Wash and Ash pale monstrosities in front of it. Whatever ‘spectral entity’ had taken it upon itself to control their spooky little radio…thing…clearly had a metric fuckton to say, though none of it seemed particularly helpful. Or, y’know, mummy-related.

For shits and giggles, he rapped his knuckles gently against the stretch of wall he was walking along, putting his ear close to try and hear for any sign of hollowness as Ash continued to spit out unrelated words.

“Stop. Open yard. Carpet.”

“Oh yeah,” Wash muttered at that. And oh, Conrad knew that tone. That was the temper-tantrum-on-the-horizon tone. Joshy-boy wasn’t all too pleased with the messages they were receiving from the Great Beyond. What a shocker. Like he expected lotto numbers or something. “ _Obviously_. Carpet.”

“Oooh, maybe that means you should pull up all the carpeting. Maybe the mummy left a manifesto on the hardwood,” Sam offered, and though he couldn’t see her, he could hear the grin in her voice. It made _him_ smile in turn.

 _Welly, well, well, well,_ he thought to himself, _Guess I wasn’t too far off the mark when I said you’d sniff through his bullshit, was I, new girl?_ Know what? Good. Wash deserved a little pushback every now and then…he needed someone to remind him he wasn’t half as big as the britches he seemed to think he fit into. That twerp had had it too easy for too long.

Uh…other than the whole dead sisters thing.

A force of habit, Conrad shook himself out physically, flinging that line of thought right out of his head before it could catch like a hangnail. Instead of dwelling too hard on why it might be that the guy who’d lost both his sisters in the past year was suddenly so super obsessed with making contact with the dead, he made his way back towards their huddle, guided by the dim glow of Hartley’s camera.

“Ice,” Ash said, then again a moment later, “Ice?” And God help them all, that must’ve been the phrase that activated Hartley as a government sleeper cell or some shit because all at once he was singing the opening of that Vanilla Ice song, and that just would not stand. Someone had to put an end to _that_ travesty.

“Let me try,” Conrad said, stepping out from the sidelines. He only had to feel around for a second or two before he made contact with Washington, shoving him out of frame to take his place.

“I’m sorry, is this _your_ show?” he asked indignantly, nudging him right back.

Ah, but it was too late. Conrad looked up towards the dark ceiling, raising his voice until it filled the cavernous room. “Hey, uh, mummy man! Or…woman, I guess—the stories weren’t really clear on that front. Why won’t you let anyone live in this place, huh? Is it a territory thing? Or like…?”

“Okay, that’s it.” Warning? What warning? Before he could register what was happening, there was a pair of (pathetically scrawny) arms around his torso, jerking him out of the spotlight through sheer dumb luck. If he’d been paying attention to him, oh, there wouldn’t have been _any_ chance of Wash getting the best of him like that, no sir, no ma’am. “This is why I said we didn’t want you coming, you fucking—”

He struggled against the impromptu bear hug…until his and everyone else’s attention was brought back to Ash. From that distance, the darkness only obscured the finer details of her face, so he could see the way she was half-hunched over, her hands pressing the headphones tightly to her ears; it was like she was trying to hear what was being said, or, probably more to the point given what he’d heard from the machine earlier, trying to _keep up_ with what was being said.

“Answer me. Where? Cold call. Name. Help. Where? Answer me.” Something about the repetition, he was ashamed to say, brought a finger of chill running up and down his spine like a ghostly lover’s touch. “…gone.” With that, Ash whipped the headphones off of her head, holding them away from herself as though they were actually hurting her. “That’s it,” she said, the anxiety in her voice cranked to eleven, “I’m done. I am _absolutely_ going to have a full-blown migraine in the morning.” She kept holding the damn things out, and like…

If no one else was going to take them…

Snatching them up from her, he shrugged, going to slide them over his own ears instead. ‘Going to’ being the operative phrase of course, as Wash made a grab for them immediately. A grab that _missed_. Conrad ducked out of his way just as Ash pulled the cord leading to the light, and the moment of confusion was the perfect excuse to put a few feet between the two of them. Once safely out of his reach, he put the headphones on, and…oh good Christ! The second the cushioned cups plunked over his ears, the rest of the world was swallowed up by dizzying radio static. Shit, did it _need_ to be this fucking loud?! Did ghosts just whisper through this thing or what?!

“Oh shit!” he said at what he thought was probably a perfectly normal, non-shouting volume that no one could make fun of him for later, “This is so fucking loud! How do you guys do this?!” In front of him, the others’ mouths moved, but uh, if they thought he could hear them they were out of their goddamn minds.

Maybe they were still asking the spooky scary specters questions for him to answer. Eh, it was worth a try. Frowning, he really tuned into the random noises coming from the headphones.

“I think it just said ‘grapefruit?’” he said, shrugging as he looked their way. “It might’ve had more syllables though.”

And they all nodded, so something about that must’ve made sense to them.

Man, if this was all there was to ghost hunting, he couldn’t figure out why more people didn’t do it—this shit was easy peasy. Across from him, their mouths just kept moving, and maybe he wasn’t an expert in the field of paranormal activity or anything along those lines, but it seemed strange that they’d all be talking over each other like that. Wouldn’t that confuse the super-not-fake ghosts?

“It said ‘lamp?’ Maybe?” Another minute or so and he reached his limit: He had to take the fucking things off. Removing the headphones felt a lot like surfacing in a pool, like he’d entered a completely different atmosphere where the laws of sound were different. “Man, I get what you meant earlier…” he muttered, mostly to Ash, rubbing his ear with one hand and holding the headphones out to the group with the other, “My head’s fucking _ringing_ , and—”

That was about the time he noticed they were laughing.

Hmm. Cool.

Great.

Fantastic, in fact.

“Okay, ha ha, what did I miss?” he asked, already suspecting he knew the answer.

Wash’s shit-eating grin told him all he needed to know about this particular reindeer game. “No idea what you could mean, my good man. Are you…are you accusing us of _making fun of you_ while you couldn’t hear us?” He glanced from one of his friends to the next before assuming a perfectly punchable expression of insult, “Wow. Do you really think so little of me? Of _us?_ Seriously, that says a lot about our friendship. Here I am, working for all these years to forge some kind of _trust_ , some kind of _bond_ , and you just _assume_ —”

Oh yeah? Two could play at this game.

With a sniper’s precision he turned to Sam, lifting his eyebrows as he tipped his head down to her level. “Not for nothing, but you do realize that by choosing to regularly associate with this dickbag, you’re slowly but surely allowing yourself to get infected with…” he glanced up for only a second, flapping a dismissive hand in Wash’s direction, “…whatever’s going on over there, right?” He watched as her expression made the shift from one breed of amusement to another entirely, her head tilting to one side and her lips pursing into a sly smile.

Good.

Let the psych major deal with _that_.

“Did you have to sign some kind of waiver? ‘I hereby acknowledge my sense of humor, social standing, and sanity may be irreparably harmed in the process of joining Washington Pictures, Incorporated, etcetera etcetera ad infinitum?’ Something like that?”

She laughed, and oh he _felt_ Washington roll his eyes. “Aw shoot…you know, it never even crossed my mind. I should probably look into that.”

Offering her both a sagely nod and the headphones, Conrad sighed, “You probably should.” When she didn’t take the god-awful headset out of his hand, he jiggled it temptingly. “But here, new girl, you wanna try and commune with the spirit world? I won’t lie to you…turns out it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Well, unless you’re super into grapefruit, I guess.”

Sam held his eyes for another beat, and he realized with a brief sinking in his gut that oh no. It wasn’t only _Wash’s_ shit this one could sniff through. The thought brought him neither joy nor comfort. Eventually, though, she took the headphones from him, shaking her head as she said, “Okay, okay…but _only_ so I can say I know what it’s like.” She paused before putting them over her ears, eyes moving to each of them in turn. “I swear to God,” she started, lowering her voice into a deathly serious register, “If _any_ of you three decide it’s gonna be funny to sneak up on me while I’m doing this…”

“Hey, no fair!” Hartley said, actually sounding legitimately offended, “Why didn’t you include Ash in that?”

“Because _Ashley_ isn’t an _asshole_.”

Conrad snickered…and then stopped. “Hey!”

It seemed Ash had recovered from her time speaking with the other side, lucky her. She stood between Hartley and Wash, arms folded, averting her eyes as she said, “She has a point,” juuust loud enough to be heard.

“Man, whatever. Fuck you guys,” he shot back breezily enough, pulling his phone out of his pocket to see if he’d missed anything important during all of that.

“Y’know, for someone who _insisted_ on coming with us for this, you’re sure not…hey, are you even listeni…”

He was not, in fact, listening to Hartley. Not to say he couldn’t hear him—he could—but fuck if he was _listening_ , because there, _right there_ , bright and bold on his screen was what he’d been waiting for.

Fliss  
  
**Today** 4:17 PM  
It’s due the Tuesday before break, I just checked.  
  
Cool cool cool, all the time in the world then  
  
So you got any fun weekend plans?  
  
All work and no play yadda yadda  
  
**Today** 8:53 PM  
Define “fun weekend plans.”  
  


_Fuck_ the CREEPs. They could handle a few minutes of chit-chat with Casper on their own…he wasn’t about to miss _this_ opportunity.

Fliss  
  
Define “fun weekend plans.”  
  
Define fun, huh?  
  
Tall order…  
  


That time her response was all but instantaneous, dispelling every last ounce of uncertainty he’d had that morning. The charm boomerang was coming around, all right…collision course, baby.

Fliss  
  
Call me crazy but I can’t help the feeling you and I both have very different meanings for the word.  
  
Just a hunch I have.  
  
Fun…fun…hmm…how does one…describe fun  
  
Oh you know…dinner, dancing, partaking of frosty amber liquids…  
  
You ever do anything like that?  
  
“Frosty amber liquids.”  
  
That doesn’t sound like a yes OR a no to me, leading me to the conclusion that maybe you need to be introduced to the wonders of FUN  
  
If you’re looking for a guide into the wide, wondrous world of ENTERTAINMENT and RELAXATION, I should let you know I am both ready and willing  
  
Uh huh…  
  
I’m sure you are.  
  
Would it sweeten the deal if my offer came with a satisfaction guarantee?  
  
This will surprise you I’m sure, Conrad, but…  
  
No?  
  
I’m not sure it would.  
  
Well if you check the fine print  
  


That was where his text ended.

It was not where he had _intended_ for his text to end, but it was where it ended nonetheless.

See, that was when Sam began screaming bloody fucking murder.

His phone clattered to the floor as he jumped a mile out of his skin, something dark flying a yard or so past his face until it crashed against the wall (later, he’d realize it had been the headphones). Whirling around, he saw Ash drop to her knees in front of Sam who, at some point during the past few minutes, had ended up on the floor herself, her legs splayed out before pulling tight to her chest. Her face was white as a newly bleached sheet, her eyes taking up the better half of her face, and maybe it was just the dark, dank basement thing, or maybe it was all the ghost talk, but holy shit the sight of her had his own pulse going at about five hundred miles an hour.

“Which one of you did that?!” she snapped, glaring first at him, then Hartley, then Wash, her lower lip threatening to start wibble-wobbling at any second.

His many, many years as an older sibling had taught him that particular expression was not the look of someone you wanted to fuck with, but…whatever she was talking about, _he_ sure hadn’t done it. So quietly, _helpfully_ , he pointed a finger towards the most likely candidate.

“None of us—” Wash began…at least until he saw him pointing his way, “Oh fuck you dude, you’re not helping! Asshole. You okay, Sammy? You get spooked?”

She wasn’t smiling. The fear and indignation on her face was such that it was hard for him to remember what her smile had looked like in the first place. “Which. One. Of. You. _Did. That?_ ” she repeated, jaw grit tight, “Seriously, that wasn’t funny.”

“Really gonna need you to elaborate on the who-what-where. We stayed right here like good little boys and—”

She cut Washington off by pointing viciously towards the (probably broken) headphones on the ground. “That stupid thing,” Sam said slowly, “Said my _name_.”

And that was a little _too_ PG13 horror-movie for him, thanks very much. Conrad bent down to scoop his phone off the ground, praising every deity he’d ever heard of, and a few he hadn’t, that his case had kept his screen from cracking. If anything supernatural had ever happened in that stupid basement, his unshattered screen was probably it. Two drops in one night? And it was _still_ in one piece?! Oh, someone was looking out for him.

“Shit,” Hartley sighed as Conrad swiped his texts open again, typing an explanation-slash-reply to Fliss’s single accusatory question mark, “Guess mummy man’s picked his first victim.”

Mummy man!

Before he could forget, Conrad added the big MM to his silent list of thank yous, going so far as to pick a random wall and shoot it a quick finger-gun and a wink. Someone sure had his phone’s best interest at heart…might as well have been Schrodinger’s mummy.

…he caught himself actually entertaining that thought and froze, pulling in a deep breath before scrubbing at his face with his free hand. Oh, this was going to be a long fucking night. He _knew_ this was going to happen…he was letting himself get infected by their weirdness! That had to stop. Effective immediately. If not sooner.

He watched as Ash and Hartley did their awkward flirting routine as they tried to fit the spirit box back in its case. When the social anxiety of witnessing _that_ train wreck became too much, he turned to see how Sam and Wash were faring (not a whole lot better, just judging by the pout blondie was rocking)…and then an idea popped into his head.

He stopped mid-text, holding down the delete button until everything he’d typed up disappeared.

Fliss  
  
How about this…  
  
Three guesses what I’M doing for fun tonight  
  
Hoo boy.  
  
You get three whole guesses!  
  
If you can’t get it, then you have to be my partner for that project due before break  
  
Sound fair?  
  
Uh huh.  
  
Sure…  
  
You’re forgetting a very important detail though.  
  
?  
  
What do I win if I guess correctly?  
  


He thought for a moment, absently clicking his tongue. Then, smirking:

Fliss  
  
Fliss. If you can correctly guess how I’m spending my night…  
  
Which you won’t, fair warning  
  
Then you have my solemn oath  
  
My word as a gentleman and a scholar  
  
My promise  
  
Oh God.  
  
Forget I asked!  
  
I will do the entire project FOR you  
  
No ifs ands or buts  
  


The little ‘…’ bubble appeared at the bottom of his screen. Disappeared. Popped up again. Disappeared again. He watched as it happened, knowing there was no way in hell she’d missed the obvious—that she was agreeing to work with him on that dumb sociology assignment either way—and simply hoped for the best.

After what felt like twenty years, his phone buzzed in his hand.

Fliss  
  
As long as you understand you’re doing the annotated bibliography win or lose, then fine.  
  
It’s a deal.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another Halloween, another CREEPs project started...and then very, VERY slowly updated, lol.
> 
> I hope you guys have been enjoying the ride so far, and Lord help me, I hope you're staying safe, sane, and healthy out there! It feels like this year has simultaneously gone on for 20 years and 20 seconds, and idk about you guys, but I've been through like 6 discrete character arcs during that.
> 
> Know I'm sending all my best vibes your way, and as always, I'mma do my best to keep throwing words into the ether in hopes of giving you a laugh or two ;) Hang in there! <3


	4. (Spooky scary) skeletons in the closet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Conrad says WAY too much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends! We're back in light, comedic body horror land, so please be aware of that - we are, after all, talking about bathtub soup ;)

“You did.”

“I did not.”

“You _absolutely_ did, and the more you say you didn’t, the more I’m convinced that you did!”

Drumming his fingers against the unpleasantly sticky surface of the apartment’s coffee table, Conrad exhaled an exhausted breath through his nose. “I’m a grown-ass adult who is perfectly aware of his bodily functions and I am telling you asshats that I know for a _fact_ I did not piss myself.”

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much…” Hartley snickered, reaching over to meet Wash’s hand in a high-five.

Thirty minutes. He’d been in their grimy apartment for thirty fucking minutes and this had been the sum total of conversation: Ha ha ha, hee hee hee, isn’t it so funny how we almost gave Conrad a heart attack back at the house? We’re so whimsical and funny and smart, ho ho ho, har-de-har-har-har. Even _Ash_ had gotten in on it, though _Sam_ at least seemed to have enough decency inside of her to keep from outright jeering at him.

Didn’t have enough of that decency to, y’know, say ‘No guys, I _won’t_ be part of this super stupid prank,’ but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

The details of their stupid goof weren’t important. They’d kept searching the basement. It’d been dark. Ash had ‘gotten sick.’ He’d been a _good fucking person_ and gone to check on her—like _good people do!_ —and what had he gotten in return? Well, he’d gotten the fuck (but _not_ the piss!) scared out of him.

To his credit, he absolutely would’ve noticed something was off if he hadn’t been so distracted by the fact that the gang’s matching hoodies had the word ‘CREPES’ printed on them for some reason. If he hadn’t been trying to puzzle that one out, there was no question in his mind he would’ve noticed that Ash was acting suspicious or that there were lumps under the cuffs of her sleeves or something like that. As it was, though, he’d been trying to figure out why the fuck the CREEPS ghost hunting team had matching sweatshirts that said CREPES instead, so no. No, he hadn’t been expecting it when she’d lunged at him with her stupid white-out contacts and all that fake blood Wash was always carting around in the back of his car like some sort of discount dollar store Patrick Bateman.

Assholes. Oh, they thought it was the _funniest_ thing that had ever happened in the history of the _world_. It had been days! _Days!_ And they were still laughing!

He’d come here to watch the episode they’d put together and to okay the segments he was in—he had _not_ come here to have a bunch of idiots without enough charisma between them to fill a teaspoon point and giggle at him. Of course, that hadn’t turned out a whole lot better because, see, these boneheads thought they were _real_ funny; they’d turned his episode (the one they’d insisted on titling ‘MUMMY MANSION – EXPOSED!!!’) into the _one_ offering on their stupid YouTube channel where everything was—surprise!—easily explained away by science and/or common sense. _Not_ ghosts. Or ghouls. Or mummies. Or…shit, what else was there? Vampires? Goblins?

He was seriously beginning to doubt that working with these fuckers would be worth spooking Alex and Julia after all.

“Okay,” he groaned when the bullying became too much for his itty-bitty feelings to handle and a change of subject felt just as necessary as his next breath, “Serious question time, if you lugs are done busting my chops.” He adjusted his position on the couch, leaning in closer to the center of their group, “Have you guys ever seen _anything_ that could possibly be real? Shit you couldn’t explain?”

Sam was the first to bow out of the conversation. “Don’t look at me, I’m the newbie here. I haven’t gone looking for anything creepy _or_ crawly until I joined up.”

“Fair enough. Dorks?” He turned his gaze towards the other three, less than surprised when they all sort of grimaced.

“Uh…n…no. No, I don’t think so?”

“Hey, that’s not true! What about that Polaroid from Cochise’s aunt’s house? That shit was pretty convincing…”

“Dude. For the _millionth_ _time_ , that was a fucking moth.”

“Oh please. That was a top quality orb, my doubtful friend. Legit ghost material.”

“It was a _moth_.”

“Orb.”

“It had _eyes!_ ”

“Haunting, ghostly eyes. Stared right into my very _soul_. Laid my whole person bare. The pure sense of _knowing_ in those eyes…the _hatred_ in that stare…”

“It had wings and antennas!”

“ _Antennae_.”

“Thanks, Ash. No one would’ve understood what I meant otherwise.”

He was used to their shtick by that point, so he just let them go, leaving them free to act out their little _Three Stooges_ act to their hearts’ content. Really, he knew there wasn’t much on Earth that could stop them once they got started anyway…it was better to keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times when dealing with Wash and his horror harem, honestly, and he was in too good a mood today to risk getting one of his fingers caught in the gears of that particular merry-go-round. _Way_ too good a mood.

He did have a _date_ tonight, after all.

“Ghost moth,” he said with a nod, “Cool. Super spooky. Y’know, if you guys _really_ wanted to scare your audience, not sure why you stopped with the whole comedy thing…shit sure gave _me_ nightmares.”

Oooh, that one must’ve hit close to home, because Hartley actually turned around in his little swivel chair and looked away from his computer for the first time since Conrad had knocked on their door. “For your _information_ ,” he began, “We were _hilarious_. I-i-it’s not _our_ fault Vine went defunct, that was all on—”

There was a snort from Ash’s side of the couch, and uh oh, trouble in paradise, Hartley’s attention shifted to her instead. “What? I mean…he’s right,” she said, a wicked curve to her lips. “Seriously though, the cooking stuff was _wayyy_ scarier. Like geez Louise, did you guys pay attention in Home Ec even _once?_ ”

“The answer to that one’s gonna be a resounding, uh, no.”

Rolling his eyes and holding his hands up as though to defend himself from this bloodthirsty onslaught of (totally fair) criticism, Wash pointed out, “Hey, never once have I had a reason to know how to cook, okay?”

“Uuuntil the cooking show,” Ash interrupted.

“Until the cooking show,” he ceded. “If you hadn’t noticed, I’m an artistic, talented, _wealthy_ individual with a solid metabolism and very generous genetics. I can afford to eat all of my meals fresh out of the microwave, thank you very much. Now Cochise, on the other hand—”

“Fuck you too, dude.” And aw man, was that an actual crack in his voice? Precious. So precious. Getting a rise out of Hartley was the easiest goddamn thing in the world—all you had to do was say anything, literally _anything_ , halfway witty with Ash in the same room. Guy was twice as transparent as any ghost they’d ever claimed to come across.

…speaking of ghosts…

Conrad leaned back on the couch, not exactly thrilled at the strange lump poking him just underneath his left shoulder blade, and nodded towards Wash. “You fucks were too busy doing your whole _Friday the 13 th_ bullshit to really explain when I asked the other night, so pardon me for belaboring the point, but uh…what’s up with the breakfast club hoodies, huh?”

Washington plucked at the front of his own, looking down into the face of the dorky ghost on his chest, its comical nerd glasses cracked as though it had been beaten up by a bigger, stronger, less blobby phantasm. Then, eyebrows slowly rising the lower his eyes went, he reached the lettering. “Yeahhh…Cochise screwed the pooch on that one.”

“So what else is new?”

“ _Hey_. Watch it, Connie.” There was a warning note in Ash’s voice, and why wouldn’t there be? She was just as easy to mess with—poke fun at Hartley one time too many and _pow!_ God, he wondered if they realized they were so obvious. He doubted it. Highly. Sincerely. Ash and Hartley were two of the stupidest smart people he’d ever met in his life, and that was a stone-cold fact. The world was likely to enter a second ice age before either one of them made anything even _resembling_ a move.

“Why don’t you get new ones, then?” he asked, “I mean, don’t get me wrong, something about the whole misspelling thing is def fairly representative of your group as a whole, but…”

Clearly rubbed raw over his typo, Hartley rolled his eyes and groaned, “Stop acting so high and mighty, Connie, it—”

Oh, good mood or not, that would _never_ fucking do. “Dude, for the last time, don’t call me Connie.”

“Everyone calls you Connie! I just want in on that action.”

“Ohoho, no everyone does _not_.” He hunkered down to show them how dead serious he was about the whole thing (and he was, in fact, quite fucking serious), explaining in the careful tone of a kindergarten teacher telling a four-year-old about the dangers of sticking craft scissors in their nose, “‘Connie’ is _exclusively_ for family and the ladies. Ladies such as our lovely, _lovely_ Miss Brown, here.” He swept an arm out towards Ash, who promptly made a noise of disbelief…but unless he was wrong (he wasn’t), who also might’ve also gone a bit pinker in the cheeks and ears.

Wash leveled his stare at him. “Am I not a pretty enough lady for you? You are unbelievable, man. You come into _my_ home, insult _my_ feminine wiles…”

“You’re not a pretty enough _anything_ for me, Washington.”

“This is why no one likes you, Bishop.”

“Uh, pretty sure your mom does. Pretty sure she likes me a _whole lot,_ in fact.” Well, now this was a well-travelled path, wasn’t it? (Much like Wash’s mom.) Grinning, he leaned in again, preparing an all-out, full-frontal ‘Your Mom’ assault, when Hartley interrupted him.

“Heyheyhey, not to press the pause button on this meeting of the minds, but…let’s do this scientifically. Can _I_ call you Connie?”

He bared his teeth in what wasn’t a grimace but wasn’t exactly a smile, either. “Only if _I_ can call you Cochise.”

Ah, that seemed to drive the point home. Hartley’s mouth flattened into a line. “Okay, so that’s a hard no. Can Ash?”

“Yeah. I literally…” Conrad sighed, dramatically dropping his head into one of his hands. “I _just_ said that. Keep up, Cochise.”

“I said _no_. How about Michelle Obama?”

This was why he didn’t hang out with these assholes more than once in a blue moon. This right here. He watched Hartley for a grip, blinking a single, tired blink when he saw there was no escaping the upcoming list. “I mean, sure? If she wants to. I wouldn’t turn her down.”

“Nic Cage?”

“No.”

“Wow, okay, rude, I’m sure you’ll be hearing from his people about that. The man is a national treasure. What about Josh?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely not.”

“Interesting! And Sam?”

“I—” He’d been too distracted by the others’ idiocy to really pay much attention to what Sam had been doing up until that point, but at Hartley’s mention, he found himself compelled to look her way. It was then, looking at her profile as she flipped through her notebook, that he realized with a fair amount of surprise that the answer that had immediately popped into his mind had been ‘no.’ “I mean…”

She perked up at the sound of her own name, eyebrows first arching upwards and then knitting. “Oh, uh. Should I be insulted?”

“No— _no_. You could call me Connie if the spirit moved you,” he said slowly, tilting his head this way and that, an itch tickling the grey matter at the very back of his brain. It was like there was something he was missing and it was on the very tip of his tongue…

“Uh, thanks.”

“Nice, man. Real nice. You come into my home, you insult _Sammy’s_ feminine wiles…”

“ _No_ , I…it’s nothing _personal_ , you just…” And then it clicked. Oh, holy shit did it click.

“What?” Wash taunted. “Say it.”

Without turning to him, Conrad flipped him the bird. Now that it had occurred to him, saying it out loud felt stupid, like running into your parents’ room to tell them how terrifying your nightmare had been only to realize, oh whoops, maybe there wasn’t actually anything inherently scary about being in an aquarium where the all the water and fish were purple. Then again, he needed to remember he was talking to a bunch of people who willingly told the internet at large that they poked around abandoned McDonald’s PlayPlaces to find ghosts, so like.

They could probably deal.

“You look _just_ enough like my sister that it would be weird. Like, you don’t look _exactly_ like her, but it’s really, _really_ close, and—” Something _else_ occurred to him then. This was a primo opportunity to get the creepy crawlies back on track! Forgetting Sam entirely, he whirled around to Wash, grinning that innocent down-home grin that showed his dimples so well. “Hey! So, speaking of my sister…do you remember the terms of our little arrangement?”

If he was moved by the dimples, Wash didn’t let on. “Uh, yeah. You took us to a dingy, late-80’s split-level with no ghosts and lots of dust, and in return, you got to pretend like you had friends for a night.”

“Ooh, burn!”

Conrad ignored Hartley entirely, sticking an accusatory finger in Wash’s face as he got up from the couch to more efficiently round on him. There was no _way_ he was going to let this weasely weasel weasel out of their deal…sel. “And! _And_ you said you’d scare someone for me.”

“Pretty sure we did that too.” With a wave of his hand, Wash had Hartley play (and replay…and replay again) the part of their exploration through the mansion where, wow, how hilarious, Ash had scared the fuck out of him. He was still fairly convinced they’d edited the video in some way to make his voice sound shriller than it actually was, but he knew damn well neither of them would ever admit to it.

“Ha ha. Funny. Real funny. You guys are a real Abbott and Costello, huh? Look, if you’re gonna be a little shit and renege on our deal…”

“Oh blah blah blah…would you quit yapping and get to the point already, man?”

He clapped once, rubbing his hands together in what was most certainly a very business-like manner and not at all reminiscent of a cartoon villain preparing to tie someone to the railroad tracks. “Okay, okay, so. The chump in question is JJ’s boyfriend. Just need to get a good scare in to fuck with his bullshit macho act—”

“Wait, Alex?”

For a second there, his brain cramped up. Something about hearing Alex’s name out of Hartley’s mouth just hit pause on the whole shebang. “How did y…oh shit, right, you’re friends with Brad, aren’t you?” Shit. Oh _shit_. If they mentioned _any_ of this to Brad, he was SOL. “Ugh! God—don’t you bring _him_ in on this! I think we all know Bradical’s a man of many talents, but subterfuge? Not one of ‘em.” Which was being kind, really. Exceptionally kind. The kinda kind only doddering old grandmothers could usually achieve.

Thankfully, he found no resistance from the peanut gallery. “Yeah, no.”

“Bless his little heart, he tries.”

“ _Does_ he?”

Meanwhile, Wash’s posture had changed in a small, subtle way, his head inclined at an angle that years of experience had taught him meant he was listening especially carefully. He sniffed disinterestedly, which again suggested that he was, in fact, extremely interested. “What, precisely, did the elder Smith do to get in your bad book? Never pegged you as the protective sort, Conman.”

He blew a raspberry that tapered off into a snicker. “Protective? Nah, not me. This is just, uh…” Ah, but here was…a crossroads.

The less these fuckers knew about his _actual_ intentions, the better. He’d seen how they handled themselves, and he was not about to get himself into some sort of shitty _Monkey’s Paw_ situation where he got them to agree to this prank only for them to fuck him over in the end. Like, say, how they’d managed to fuck him over with the stupid Mummy Mansion episode. Nuh-uh, no way. Not in this lifetime. Wash would find out about the inevitable wedding when his parents made their bi-annual call to check in on him and mentioned something about ‘that sweet Bishop girl getting married.’ No sooner. So help him God.

“ _Initiation!_ What are we older brothers good for, if not putting the fear of God into baby sis’s prospective datemates, right? I mean,” he chuckled, nudging Josh with his elbow, “You know what _that’s_ like. It’s our job!”

It came to him a moment too late that, uh.

Fuck.

Wash’s sisters weren’t exactly in need of protecting anymore, were they?

Mmm.

Yikes.

Whoops.

Wash’s smile tightened. “I’ll fucking think about it.”

Conrad pretended not to realize this was a grade-A foot-in-mouth situation, doubling down in hopes that it would get them out of the conversation that much faster. “ _Think_ about it? You _promised!_ ”

“Yeah, and _you_ promised _us_ a mummy man, so…”

“I did not _promise_ you a mummy. I said—”

“Ah, and now you’re gonna make up a whole _new_ load of crap and try to sell me on it, huh? Not how it works.”

“I’m not making anything up!” He kept the indignation in his voice, but _phew_ was he glad they’d waltzed their way out of Dead Sibling Station.

“Oh bull-fucking-shit, dude, you’re—”

“All I did was tell you what my mom told _me_ , okay? I can’t control the information that’s passed on to me—I can only convey it to you…”

“Christ alive…”

“…in a manner that’s both truthful _and_ entertaining! I didn’t say _we’d_ find a mummy, I said someone else _did!_ Once. A while ago. But— _but!_ ” Oh thank God for his dad’s big fucking mouth, and thank God he’d been attentive enough that night at dinner to get a workable story out of it, “That wasn’t the only story she got from the previous homeowners!” Oho, _that_ got ‘em. The girls might not’ve cared, but Wash and Hartley were both watching him expectantly.

Fantastic. He had…such a story ready for them. “For real,” he continued, “Get this: The guy who owned the place before the most recent couple? He _died_ in there!”

“Uh huh.”

“ _In the shower!_ He didn’t have any family or anything, so it took the mail people noticing that his mailbox was crammed full to go ‘Huh, wonder where this sad sap is.’ So they called in a welfare check, the cops came, and they found this guy in the bathroom, dead in the tub, with the shower _still running!_ It’d been going the whole fucking time! They said by the time they found him…” He paused for dramatic effect, eyes flicking from Wash to Hartley and back again, “…they couldn’t tell the difference between him and the shower!”

“They…wait. Wh…what does…Conrad. What in the _fuck_ could that possibly mean?!”

“It _means_ —”

“D-d-did he fucking _become_ a shower? Is that the scary part of this story?”

“No, asshole! His skin like—”

“ _Became porcelain tile?!_ I’m pretty sure I could tell the difference between a spongy-ass skeleton corpse and a _shower!_ ”

How were they not getting this?! This was the grossest story of the century! Why were they just looking at him like that, like he was some kind of loony rambling about the moon being hollow?! This was a serious tale from the crypt! A yuck-fest the likes of which no human had ever heard before! “You obtuse morons are missing the point!”

Fingers rubbing slow circles into his temples, Washington craned his head back until he was staring at the ceiling’s recessed lighting. “The point,” he repeated, “What would the point _be_ , exactly? That through the alchemy of simple city tap water, a man in the house we found nothing—repeat: nothing—in was transmogrified into grout-proof ceramic?”

He was going to murder them. Both of them. Fuck strangling, he was just going to bash their heads together until they were nothing but pulp. “Don’t you do this,” he said, shaking his head with something like betrayal, “Don’t you _dare_ pretend like this isn’t the sickest shit you’ve ever heard.”

“It’s not, though,” Wash said slowly.

“I-i-it doesn’t make _sense_ ,” Hartley agreed.

“How does it not make sense?! His body was eroded away until it was _unrecognizable_ , and—”

“You can tell bones from a shower!”

He raised his hands, flexed his fingers, balled them into fists, flexed them again, dropped them to his sides with a groan that bordered on a scream. “He fucking _disintegrated!_ The man became _soup!_ Why don’t you get that?! The motherfucker became a goddamn _stew!_ ”

“Not possible. Absolutely not possible. I don’t claim to be a whiz at biology or anything, but—”

“Why is this an argument?” Hartley stood from his chair, shaking his head. “This is…this…fuck this! Fuck this and fuck you. Look.” He jerked his hand towards the back of the apartment, and the three of them filed through one of the bedrooms to make it to the bathroom. The shower curtain’s hooks screamed bloody murder when the curtain itself was flung open, making him recoil. “You look into that tub. And you explain to me. How a human being. Could be _that_.”

As he looked down into the basin of the tub, it did stand to be said that he realized perhaps he had worded his claims a little, well, loosely. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Conrad Bishop might’ve been a man who could _recognize_ when he’d been wrong, but he was not a man who _admitted_ when he’d been wrong. So he joined Hartley in front of the tub, pointing just as furiously. “He kicked it in the tub. The water kept running. His body plugged the drain, so it just collected, and the water beat at him until it—”

“The worst,” Wash interrupted, butting in between the two of them to _also_ stare down into the tub, “That could’ve _possibly_ happened…is that he fuckin’ filled the thing with little jelly-bits of himself that kinda coagulated or whatever, but I don’t think when the first responders got there that their initial thought was ‘Aw shit. Look at that. Man’s a shower now. Damnedest thing.’”

“They—”

“It’s not even scary, that’s the thing! Like, you get that, right? You get that it’s not scary? Are you trying to say that like, there’s some kind of gooey flesh-colored Jell-O ghost in that house? Th-that, what, we should’ve gone in there and shot something like ‘Mummy Man and Bathtub Soup Guy: The Sitcom?!’”

“He’s a desiccated raisin…and _he’s_ human-flavored oatmeal,” Wash interrupted, speaking with a tv narrator’s projection and panache, “What hijinx _will_ they get up to? Find out next week.”

“Really not sure I appreciate the tone, fuckwits.” … _fuck!_ He was doing it again! He was letting their bullshit infect him. “Y’know, I don’t need to stand here and defend myself—”

“Uh, you kinda do. You came in here talking about—”

“I just need you guys to fucking _agree_ that you’re still going to help me scare the pants off of Alex. That’s it. That’s all I need. I thought maybe you’d find my tale of bone broth man charming and delightful, but clearly I can see that I was wrong—”

“ _Clearly_.”

Reaching into the deepest depths of his heart, he found it within himself to ignore that snide aside instead of yoinking Hartley’s glasses off his face and playing keepaway. “So? Are we still square? You’re gonna give him the works, right? The _works._ ”

The two of them traded a look he wasn’t really the biggest fan of, but eventually Wash rolled his eyes and heaved a long-suffering sigh through his nose. “Yeah, sure. Fine. We’ll figure something out.”

The relief that washed over him was immense.

“After break.”

His eyes flew open from his impromptu moment of bliss, opening his mouth before the numbers added up.

After break?

After break.

Well that was…fuck. He _still_ hadn’t gone through Julia’s Facebook to check their stupid anniversary date, but…he was still feeling spring. It was probably spring…right? Spring was, after all, the most _romantic_ of seasons, what with the flowers and the sunshine and all the animals doing the deed to make a bunch of baby animals, so…after break was…probably okay.

“Suuure…” Conrad said slowly, stretching the word out until it had something like five or six syllables. “I…yeah, sure, after break. Cool. I have some ideas, by the way, in case you guys—”

“You insist on leeching off the wild popularity of my internet show,” Wash started up again, ignoring Harley’s low ‘ _Our_ internet show’ as he squeezed his gangly-ass body between the two of them to worm his way out of the bathroom, staying a few steps ahead even as they followed him into the living room. “You give me _nothing_ to work with. You try to tell _me_ about the finer points of decomposition. And then you have the audacity—the _gall_ —to suggest that your ideas for scaring people are better than mine. I don’t know what they taught you in all those manners classes your mom made you take back in junior high, but I have half a mind to tell her she should look into getting a refund.”

From the floor, a new voice offered its two cents: “Oh, absolutely. She should _definitely_ put in a formal request.”

“Okay, first off, wow, that was entirely uncalled for, but secondly, I sure don’t remember inviting _you_ into this conversation.”

Ash wasn’t much in the way of a smirker, but she gave it her best shot. Kind of precious, really. “You guys have been literally screaming about dead guys in bathtubs this whole time. I’d be shocked if the neighbors didn’t start knocking on the door to give _their_ opinions.” She pulled her knees up to her chest as she leaned back against the front of the couch, and for a horrendous moment he was positive she was about to launch into her own explanation of how human bodies decayed in water…but that wasn’t exactly what happened. Ash opened her mouth to say something (probably the aforementioned scientific explanation), simultaneously nudging Sam with her shoulder, and something must’ve felt off about the whole thing because her smile wavered as she turned towards her and away from him and the guys.

It was then that he realized Goldilocks wasn’t looking so hot. Last he’d actually paid attention to her, she’d been going through her notebook with a pencil tucked into the loose knot of hair at the back of her head and a highlighter in her hand, but now? Now she looked…to put it frankly, Sam looked like she was about to blow chunks all over Wash’s carpeting.

“Is she, uh…oookay?” Conrad asked under his breath, unsure whether he should be anticipating ( _another_ ) stupid jumpscare.

“Uh…”

“Sam? Hellooo…Ground Control to major Sam?” Wash pushed past him and walked the few steps to the couch, crouching down to wave a hand in front of her face. “You feelin’ okay there, Sammy?” he asked when she seemed to shake herself out of it.

While he still wasn’t totally convinced this wasn’t about to be another dumb prank getting pulled at his expense, Conrad felt himself begin to frown. Ash might’ve _acted_ sick back at the house, but Sam _looked_ ill—like legitimately _ill_ —sort of grey in the face and lips, and that shit was hard to fake.

A sympathetic puker by nature, he readied himself to make a beeline for the door, should it come to that.

“I…yeah, yeah, sorry…” Sam mumbled, sounding just as out of it as she looked. Without explaining what sort of stick she’d jammed up her ass, she started shoving her things into her bag, paying absolutely zero attention to what was going where. He could hear papers getting crumpled. Not a great sign. “I just, uh…I think I’m coming down with something.”

“Oh nooo! Really?”

“Yeah, it’s…I’m gonna, um, head out, I think?”

He didn’t say as much, but that sounded like an excellent idea. He’d seen that look on people’s faces before—that was the look that came after ‘I can absolutely handle one more shot, guys, seriously!’—not the sort of thing one wanted to see on their houseguest’s face.

“You want a ride?” Wash asked, ever the gentleman, reaching over to help her up before she waved him away.

Sam stood, wobbling unsteadily on her feet, and shook her head _way_ too quickly for someone who was knock-knock-knocking on Good Lady Pukington’s front door. “Nope, I could use the air. It’s fine.”

Welp, this felt like as organic a time as any…Conrad checked his watch and made the all the requisite sounds of disappointment when he saw the time. “I should be heading out too.” Again he paused for effect, taking a moment to actually straighten his shirt out a bit as he added, “Got a _hot date_ tonight.”

The other three were still obviously concerned with Sam…and yet it didn’t stop them from getting in one last jab apiece.

“Doubtful,” Ash said flatly.

“Sounds fake, but okay,” Hartley added.

“Aw, you didn’t tell me your mom was coming over!” Wash said, rounding out the three of them. There wasn’t, however, the usual smarmy grin accompanying the insult; nah, he was too busy watching Blondie stagger her way towards the door.

Well, whatever. Weirdness followed those freaks like a shadow in a well-lit room. All he knew was he had places to be, and those were places he’d prefer to go _without_ any sort of vomit on his person, so he was gonna go while the getting was good. One last halfhearted wave to the CREEPs and he was off!

Unfortunately, it seemed Sam was heading the same way. He couldn’t just… _overtake her_ in the hallway (he wasn’t a _monster_ ), but man, he didn’t need to be dealing with this on top of everything else he’d just had to endure back at Mystery Inc. “Hey, seriously, you sure you’re gonna be okay to get back to your place?” he asked as he caught up to her, slowing his stride so they were going at the same pace.

No answer.

Great. He watched as she shakily started down the stairs and god _damn_ his proper upbringing—he couldn’t just leave her to handle that alone! Moving at a speed that would’ve made a snail look like Speed Racer, he made his way down the stairs one riser at a time, watching Sam’s expressionless face from the corner of his eye. “If you want me to like, call someone or go get one of the idiots back there I ca—”

“Hey, so…weird question for you.” She said it so suddenly that he nearly banged his elbow into the railing in surprise.

Well, talking was a good sign, wasn’t it? Sure it was. “Lucky for you, weird questions are sort of my specialty! Right after mixing highballs and bullshitting essays. Hit me.”

He’d made it to the bottom of the stairs but she hadn’t. He turned to see her still standing there on the second to last step, her face grey and her arms hugged tightly around herself. …maybe talking wasn’t as good a sign as he’d hoped.

“Earlier, you said something…uh…this is gonna sound _real_ dumb if it’s nothing, so I’m just gonna ask it anyway.” Sam heaved a sigh, and even _that_ seemed to wobble. “You said something to Josh about wanting to scare your sister’s boyfriend?”

“Well yeah, just as a joke, though!” His grin took a decidedly defensive kind of edge as he backpedaled. How much of his motivation was he going to have to explain to her about this? If word got back to Wash, there was no telling what sort of bullshittery he’d have to deal with. “Alex is cool and all, just kind of super, _super_ uptight, and God _help_ me, sometimes it’s li—”

“No, I—no. Literally, I don’t care about that.”

“Oh!” He laughed…then paused, watching her warily again. “Wait, what?” He felt like he was missing a very important piece of this puzzle.

“When you guys were talking about that, you said he ‘knows what it’s like?’”

He continued to stare at her. When her words simply trailed off, his confusion only deepened. “Uh…okay? Did I?”

“Were you saying, like…he knows what it’s like to…I thought Josh was an only child?”

“I mean, he is…well, _now_ , anyway.” It didn’t occur to him that maybe that was the sort of thing you didn’t say aloud to a person you didn’t know all that well until she grabbed his arm.

For how tiny she was, Sam had a hell of a grip. He could feel each of her fingers digging into his arm like she was Iron Man or some shit. Standing on that stair as she was, the two of them were almost of a height, so he had no choice but to look into her eyes, wide and scared and not totally _there_ as she asked, “What does that mean? What do you mean ‘ _now?’_ Like, like…like his parents have _plans_ for more kids, or—”

He wasn’t sure why he didn’t pull away from her, considering she was absolutely acting like a crazy person (and a crazy person on the verge of hoarking up her lunch onto him, at that), but he didn’t. “Uh, I meant his si—” Conrad froze, his bafflement melting away into shock, then suspicion, then realization, then finally…fuck. Oh _fuck_. Oh fuck him sideways. “Oh holy shit, you don’t know about that, do you?”

Sam stared at him.

Well that was great.

“Fffffff—okay. Okay. I think maybe I should…stop…talking…”

“Conrad.” Sam’s voice had gone dry and cracked, making her sound exactly like a spooky ghost child from a bad horror movie. “I need you to tell me about his sisters.”

“Sam, I—wait.” Anxiously, he glanced over his shoulder towards the door of the apartment, turning back to her only once he was sure it was still closed. “How did you know I was gonna say sister _s?_ ” That was an awfully lucky guess she was about to make. Suspiciously lucky.

“ _Please_.”

Oh this was fucked. This whole situation was fucked. This wasn’t something he should’ve been talking about—hell, when it had gotten brought up earlier, he’d just sort of made an ass out of himself until he and Wash had paraded themselves past it. But it didn’t look like Sam was going to be so easily swayed. Nope. Not even a little. “I probably shouldn’t…look, I’ve already…this is a _real_ dick move, and—”

“Was it a car accident?”

It was his turn to stare blankly at _her_.

“Were they _twins?_ ”

Conrad _did_ pull away from her then; slowly, yes, but deliberately. “So what’s the deal?” he asked, clearly trying to figure out what the fuck was happening, every inch as lost—as terrified—as she seemed. “Do you know the story or _not?_ Make up your mind!”

A second, maybe two, and then Sam _sprinted_ past him, the front doors to the apartment complex banging shut behind her as she all but _flew_ out of the place. Then she was just gone, leaving him standing in front of the stairs like some sort of dipshit, his stomach tied up in knots and his mouth tasting like crushed-up aspirin.

He shot another nervous glance up the stairs, almost as though he expected the CREEPs to be standing at the top, shaking their heads judgmentally or…shit, throwing balled up garbage at him or something. Of course they weren’t—why would they be?—but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d just gone and done something he shouldn’t have.

Sam must’ve known _something_ about Wash’s sisters…right? She sure seemed to know they’d been twins. And fuck, the thing about the car crash? Fucking spooky, that’s what that was! She _had_ to have known. No question. It wasn’t like he’d just _told her_ about them, he _couldn’t_ have told her about them if she _already knew_ , but…

Then why did he feel so absolutely godawful about the whole thing?

His phone buzzed in his pocket, causing him to jump about a mile into the air. The people walking by must’ve thought he was having some sort of fit, Jesus Christ…he grabbed his phone to check it, again expecting to see a flurry of furious, indignant messages (‘How could you?!’ ‘So not cool!’ ‘What gives you the fucking right?!’ ‘Who do you think you are?!’ ‘You’re such a douche!’). And again, there was nothing like that. Because…why would there be? The way Sam had run out of the place at full-tilt, he doubted squealing to the dorks was going to be her number one priority.

Fliss  
  
You’re still coming, right?  
  


He brought his other hand up to rake through his hair. Maybe Sam had the right idea after all. Maybe he just needed to take a good, long walk to calm the chaos going on in his chest and in his head. It was worth a shot, wasn’t it?

Fliss  
  
You’re still coming, right?  
  
Yeah, running a couple minutes late, my b!  
  
Save me a seat, wouldya?  
  


Without waiting for a reply, he pocketed his phone again and stepped out into the chilly air, hoping against hope that he hadn’t just really, really, _really_ gone and fucked up.

He had a sinking suspicion, though, that he had.


	5. The hot date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Conrad has a long overdue revelation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! THIS IS THE SECOND UPLOAD IN A BATCH OF TWO!!! Chapters 4 and 5 were posted together as a batch, so just in case this one starting where it does feels abrupt, maybe hop back a chapter! 
> 
> Yes I updated twice in one day. Yes this is a mess of my own making. No I don't have any excuses for myself. Enjoy! ;P

In his defense, the terminology ‘hot date’ totally stood no matter what angle you looked at it from because, like…okay, number one, the coffee shop was _very_ warm, ergo ‘ _hot_ ;’ number two, study dates were still ‘ _dates_ ,’ per the name; number three, uh…hmm. Okay, so maybe there wasn’t a number three, but that didn’t mean he was _wrong_. Him telling the CREEPs he had a hot date wasn’t a lie, that’s what mattered.

…buuut him telling Sam about Wash’s kid sisters sort of felt like it mattered more.

The walk over had not helped, as it turned out. The air had been cold and crisp, though ultimately useless in bringing down the feverish heat of his guilt. If there was any bright side to be found, it was that his stress-walking had helped him get there in record time, so like, sure, that was a plus.

He’d been so fucking _pleased_ with himself when his little half-baked scheme worked out (if betting against Fliss that she wouldn’t be able to guess he was ghost hunting really counted as a quote-unquote scheme in _any_ sense of the word), and now there he was. Victorious. Sitting in a cramped coffee shop with Fliss in all of her Fliss-ness, her Fliss-ocity, and he was…what? Bellyaching? Brooding? He was something, all right. He kept flipping through the packet of information they needed to be using for the stupid sociology project, but he wasn’t reading a goddamn word of it—his eyes just kind of slid over each letter like two greased up hogs tumbling across an obstacle course made out of hay bales.

“…for the references?”

“Hmm?” Glancing up from the same sentence he’d been trying to read for the past ten minutes, Conrad found Fliss watching him with a peculiar expression; it was an interesting little number stuck somewhere between confusion and entertainment, and not entirely unlike the kind of look you gave a toddler who kept willfully ramming their head against a door just to see what sort of noise it would make. “Oh, uh, the references! Yeah, no, that works for me.”

Her hands had been poised over her laptop’s keyboard, but at that they dropped, her arms folding atop the table. She lowered her head until her chin nearly touched the edge of her screen. “Hey, could you do me a favor?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, sure, whatcha need?”

The corners of her mouth tucked into a smile. “Repeat what I just said?”

“I, uh…” Well. Huh. Great. “You mean about the references? _In reference_ to the references, one might say?” Ah, but she didn’t answer. It seemed she meant to watch him flounder his way through this one. Duly noted. “I will admit I _may_ have missed the last thing you said.”

“Hmm.”

“ _Aaand_ maybe the thing before that.”

“You don’t say.”

“It’s also possible—and stick with me on this one, because we’re going places—it’s _possible_ I may have even missed the thing before _that_.” Out came the ‘whoops, ya got me’ grin, and out came the dimples, and out came the good, old-fashioned laughter aimed at himself, and all of it fit him like a well tailored suit. This was a road he’d walked before many a time, so he felt pretty sure that Fliss would just roll her eyes and say ‘Whatever’ and the two of them would go back to kind-of-sort-of working on this snoozefest of a project, and—

“Are you sick or something?” Fliss did in fact drop her eyes back to her laptop’s screen, but they flicked up to him for a beat as she added, “You’re being…strange.” If he really strained his ears over the ambient noise of the coffee shop’s other customers and the terribly premature Christmas music being piped in over the speakers, he thought he could hear something like concern in her voice.

“Strange? This is the way the good Lord made me! This is what normal looks like where I’m from.”

She made a low noise of doubt.

“Wow, okay. I’m going to pretend that didn’t just send a lance of ice shooting through my heart and instead focus on this oh-so-flattering outpouring of interest for my wellbeing.” Still, there was an unfamiliar weight leaching at his smile. A second…two…and it turned into a cramp. Then a pain. Then he had no choice but to drop the grin altogether, his head quickly following suit into the palms of his hands. “Fuck. _Fuck_.”

“You know, we can get this done another time if you’re si—”

“I’m not sick,” he grumbled, frowning into the safety of his hands. Except there was a problem with that: He really did _feel_ sick. Maybe not cold-and-sniffles sick, definitely not shit-your-pants sick, but every time that wide-eyed, panic-stricken look of Sam’s flashed in his memory, puking seemed like a distinct possibility.

He was about as far from a psych major as a person could humanly get (just for the record), and even so, he’d been forced to take enough psych- and soc-adjacent classes in his time to know that relationships, as a matter of course, had certain stipulations that needed to be followed if you wanted them to continue. Social contracts. Usually those fuckers were _all_ fine print, and usually he was a pro at navigating through that crap.

Usually.

Would he call Wash one of his _bosom buddies?_ Probably not. Were they confidantes? Brothers in arms? _Besties?_ Still probably not. But they were…well they were _something_ , and he’d gone and violated the very first (and _biggest_ ) clause in their understanding; namely, thou shalt not mention the dead sisters. And he got that. He did! Truly. Maybe he gave her a lot of shit, and yeah, okay, so maybe he was going to ridiculous lengths to embarrass her and her beau, but if something ever happened to JJ? Fuck, man, he didn’t think he’d be able to get out of bed in the morning! He wouldn’t know what to _do!_ So for Wash to lose _both_ of his little sisters? That shit was unthinkable. _Unthinkable!_

It had only been a year, too, and he had to imagine that under that crusty, Tarantino-flavor-blasted exterior of his, Josh was still feeling pretty miserable about the whole damn thing…and now he’d gone and run his big fucking mouth and told Sam allllll about it— _Sam_ , of all people, Sam who was the newbie in their stupid group, Sam who Wash was _clearly_ into.

Fliss’s side of the table had been suspiciously quiet for a suspiciously long time. It was probably better that way. He didn’t want to have to face the disgust or the exasperation or the frustration or, God help him, worst of all, the _pity_ she’d be looking at him with. And she would be—there was no question in his mind about that—she would be, because she didn’t have any other choice _but_ to. Because just like Sam, just like the CREEPs, just like _everyone else in his orbit_ , she was just another person who found herself _forced_ to deal with him and his pointless obsession with being clever and witty and—

“I think…I might be…an asshole.” Conrad said it slowly, thoughtfully, testing the weight of the words on his tongue and finding he didn’t much care for the taste. After a second or two, he lifted his eyes and saw (with a not insignificant twinge of discomfort) Fliss just… _staring_ at him.

She sat there across the table with her chin resting against one of her fists, only the slightest line between her eyebrows to suggest she’d registered what he’d just said. As he watched, she blinked once, slowly as a cat in a patch of sun, and then, inexplicably, she got up from the table.

“Uh…?”

But she didn’t answer. Not exactly, anyway. Her chair made a godawful screech as she stood from it, and she did, to be fair, hold up a single finger in his direction as if to say ‘Hang on.’ She crossed the coffee shop and made her way to the counter, leaning over it and gesturing towards the display case up front.

None of this made a whole lot of sense, but his guilt was still weighing him down to his chair, so he didn’t waste too much time trying to figure out what she was doing. Now that he’d said it aloud, actually put words and breath and _thought_ into it, he felt even worse than he had before— _was_ he an asshole? It wasn’t something he _tried_ to do…it wasn’t like he _reveled_ in being a dick…not more than the average person, anyway. That had to count for _something_ , didn’t it?

He slumped forward over the table, putting his head down into his arms in a self-imposed timeout. God. He was, wasn’t he? He was an asshole. An actual, factual tried-and-true asshole. Fuck. _Fuck!_ ‘Asshole’ wasn’t the look he’d been aiming for. Asshole had _never_ been the look he’d aimed for. Cool? Sure. Aloof? Okay. Charming? Definitely. Clever? Most definitely. Handsome? Oh, that went without saying, but— _shit!_ Oh goddamn it, that was how an asshole thought about themselves, wasn’t it?! Motherfucker!

The guilt sitting heavy in his stomach turned into something thick and bubbly and altogether awful, making him want to curl up and die somewhere far, far away from any spectators. Under a porch, maybe, like a raccoon might. Or a possum. Yeah…yeah, that probably would’ve been fitting…

Conrad glanced up from the table when Fliss’s chair screeched again. “Here,” she said, placing something in front of him—something that turned out to be an especially chunky cake pop covered in bright pink icing and way too many sprinkles.

“Uh…th…aaanks…?” Slowly, almost apprehensively, he took hold of its stick, his eyes flicking from it and back over to her.

“This seemed like a momentous occasion for you.” There was something like laughter in Fliss’s voice, and her smile had taken on a decidedly more genuine sort of shape. She took a bite out of a matching cake pop and shook her head, watching him with one of her eyebrows raised. “I thought you might appreciate the, er…moral support?” Once she’d swallowed, she laughed for real. It was amused, no question about that, but definitely not _teasing_ , and…well…

He _did_ appreciate that.

Still, with the roiling in his gut, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to eat anything as heavy as a cake p…oh who the hell was he kidding, he was already a bite in. “Sugar _does_ cure a whole lotta evils.”

She hummed in agreement as she took another bite, and while he was trying very hard not to make direct eye contact, it was impossible not to notice the way she was watching him. It wasn’t like she was trying to figure him out…no, it was way closer to how a little kid watched the lobsters in a tank at the grocery store, waiting to see if maybe one of them would manage to slip the rubber bands from around its claws and go on some sort of mad pinching spree. It wasn’t exactly, uh, how he was used to women looking at him.

“Am I to take it that _you_ think I’m an asshole?” he asked after he’d finished his cake pop, taking to gnawing at the end of its stick. “Is that what I’m getting here?”

True to form, Fliss shrugged. She leaned further back in her seat after shutting her laptop, giving him that appraising lobster-tank look again before twirling her own stick between her fingers. “No.” His heart soared. “I will admit that up until about…mmm…three minutes ago, I did think you were this…obnoxious, arrogant, self-absorbed, vain, pigheaded idiot, but…an asshole?” The curve of her smile became a _bit_ more barbed, though thankfully not nearly enough to gore him. “Not so much.”

“Wow. Gee. Thanks.” Despite all that, he couldn’t help laughing; Conrad dropped his head into his hands again, letting his palms cup his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see anything. “Nothing a man likes to hear more than…” But then something she said clicked. He looked up from his hands, blinking in her direction. “Wait, you said ‘until three minutes ago.’ So…does that mean you _don’t_ think I’m all those things now?”

Fliss didn’t miss a single fucking beat. “Hmm? Oh, no, I definitely still do. It’s just sort of nice to know that you’ve got other things going on too. The sudden display of self-awareness is refreshing.”

He took a breath in. It escaped him in a whoosh of laughter, incredulous and a little embarrassed, but taking with it the worst of the sourness in his stomach. “Y’know what? I will take that. I’ll take it. That was…that was a fair assessment.”

“I know.”

That got him laughing again. Much to his surprise (and pleasure) Fliss joined in. What happened next took him by surprise almost as much as the cake pop had: He launched into the whole story. Details were tweaked, to be sure (he wasn’t about to commit the same cardinal sin twice in one day, after all), but all the high points were there. The CREEPs. The ghost hunting. The new girl. The saying something he shouldn’t have. The…everything. And in a twist he never in a million years could’ve seen coming, Fliss—this poor woman who he’d annoyed in every single class they’d had together since that fateful day someone had taken his unassigned assigned seat in the lecture hall— _listened._

“You know, you _could_ just apologize,” she said when finally he lost steam, swirling what was left of her coffee around in its cup. “I get the feeling you don’t have a whole lot of experience in the way of humbling yourself to others, but take it from me, it is absolutely an option that normal people take advantage of…” she paused, gesturing thoughtfully with her hand, “…every day.”

“No, I…I get that. Like, obviously.”

She finished her coffee in a single sip, her eyebrows raised high over the rim of her paper cup as if to express her doubt that it _was_ actually to that obvious, but she let him continue instead of saying as much.

He tried to take a sip of his own drink but found it roughly ten degrees too close to lukewarm for him to stomach. “You don’t get Washington though, okay? Guy’s a real fucking piece of work. Bringing this shit up _at all_ is strictly _verboten_ —bringing it up _and_ opening the door to some kind of emotional moment? Please. I’d never hear the end of it. Besides, I don’t even know that this whole thing’s gonna get back to him in the first place! Maybe she won’t say anything and I can just slide on by and pretend it never happened.”

Fliss set her cup down. “Kind of sounds like something—”

“—an asshole would say, yeah yeah yeah.” When he groaned that time around, though, he was shocked to find how much lighter his shoulders felt. “I’ll…figure it out. I’ll come up with something.”

“You’ll…” It was hard to avoid how amused Fliss’s smile was as she spoke, painstakingly enunciating each syllable, “Apologize…?”

Conrad let his head loll back onto his shoulders as he sank lower into his seat. “I mean, I _guess_. If it comes to that.”

“You are…unbelievable.”

“Thank you. I’ve been told.”

There was a quiet tip-tip-tap as Fliss drummed her fingers against her laptop. “What I don’t understand,” she said as he straightened up again, “Is the _why_. If your friend—”

He was mostly joking when he cringed. “Eugh. If you could refrain from using the f-word when discussing my association with Joshua Washington, that would be… _so_ ideal…”

“— _if your friend_ ,” she said again, louder that time, “Is so difficult to deal with, then why are you dealing with him in the first place? It sounds an awful lot to me like you’ve been going out of your way to be around him and the others.”

“What, you don’t go ghost hunting with _your_ casual acquaintances?” The only response he got was another expectant look, so he folded his arms on the table and exhaled an overly dramatic raspberry. Hey, he hadn’t scared her off yet, right? Might as well ante up. “Do you have siblings?”

It was clear from the way her face pulled itself in about five different directions that Fliss hadn’t expected that particular shift in topic. “I…” For a moment she eyed him warily, almost as if she was expecting he was trying to pull something over on her. “…do…”

“Any of ‘em younger than you?”

The wariness intensified. “…yes…”

“Okay. Well. What would you do if you woke up tomorrow and they called you up and said ‘Hey! Guess what? I’m getting married!’?”

And there it was. Precisely what he’d anticipated.

The grimace.

“Ugh. Don’t even put that out into the universe.”

“Right? _Right?!_ ” He smacked the table once for emphasis, “Thank you! My little sister’s boyfriend is getting ready to pop the question—”

“I am so sorry.”

“Thank you. Much appreciated. But anyway, I’ve been riding this existential spiral _pretty hard_ since I found out, and just between you and me? I’m trying to find a way to make myself feel a _little_ bit better about the whole thing, and the one fool-proof method I was able to come up with is scaring the _ever-loving fuck_ out of the two of them. And videotaping it, obvs, so I have something to show at every family party from here to eternity. A hilarious token of my sibling superiority to have and to hold until death do us part. And to do _that_ …”

“…you need the internet ghost hunters to help you out.”

Instead of saying yea or nay, he lifted both hands in her direction, palms up in a universal sign: There ya go!

“That seems like a _lot_ of trouble to go through just to prank your sister.”

She had him there. There was no use denying it. “Yeah, I’m, uh, quickly coming to realize that maybe I jumped the shark on this one. Don’t spread that around, though, I have a reputation to uphold.”

“Uh huh. A ‘reputation—’” and oh, those finger-quotes could’ve cut through diamond, “—if I may, that led you to question your own moral fiber in the middle of a Starbucks.”

He held up a finger to correct her. “Ah, ah…in the middle of a Starbucks with— _with!_ —my very understanding, beautiful, compassionate, beautiful, talented, intelligent, _beautiful_ project partner—”

“Your project partner would like to point out to you that literally _zero_ progress was made on the project in question.”

“Oh. Uh…” He glanced down to the spread of papers between them, most having been pushed to the side during his little story time. “My bad.” It was also right around that time he realized how dark it had gotten outside, how the only lights outside the warm, Christmassy glow of the coffee shop were streetlights and headlights. “Oops.”

Checking the time on her phone before beginning to pack her things, Fliss sighed and shrugged. “Guess that means we’ll have to do this again.”

“…guess we will,” he said, feeling that downhome smile start to tug at his lips again, narrowing his eyes juuust slightly as he searched her face for any sign of _legit_ frustration. There was none. “Soon, probably! I mean, I’d imagine.”

Fliss breathed out another laugh as she shook her head. “If I could make a request? Maybe next time the emotional heart-to-heart can come _after_ we get a few paragraphs written, okay?”

“That sounds perfectly fair. I mean, I can’t make any promises, but…sounds fair.” Conrad snickered at the look she threw his way for that little chestnut, but when Fliss lowered her head again to pack up the rest of her stuff, he felt another unfamiliar tug in the region of his chest. “Uh…thanks, by the way.” He made a point to look elsewhere as he said it, packing up his stuff as well, if only to give himself a valid reason to not make eye contact. “For listening to all that crap. And for thinking I’m not an asshole.”

“Not a _complete_ asshole,” she said, and it was hard to tell, but it sounded like she was smiling. “And you’re welcome. I’d also like to thank _you_ , if I might, for _proving_ you’re not a complete asshole. Really makes me feel a whole lot better about working together on this assignment.”

The laugh that came out of him came distressingly close to being a snort. “Yeah, no problem. Glad I could be of service.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well hello again! A very, very quick note from me - I've got a few holiday projects with deadlines that are RAPIDLY APPROACHING that are taking up a good chunk of my attention...but HOPEFULLY I will be back to uploading new stuff in a more regular manner soon. Well, uh...as 'regular' as /I/ ever get, hahaha!
> 
> As always, thank you guys SO MUCH for reading, I hope you're having at least half as much fun going through this as I'm having writing it, and I hope you're all hanging in there and staying healthy and sane and (if you're like me and already up to your ankles in snow) WARM!!!
> 
> Without spoiling too much, we will OFFICIALLY be in a post-Blackwood (and post-possession ;P) world starting next chapter...so OH we will be going places. Until next time!!

**Author's Note:**

> Oh it feels so good to be back ;)
> 
> Hope you guys are staying safe and healthy out there!!!


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